UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 


\AA^Lr^\. 


OF 


Class 


HUMAN 
SUBMISSION. 


SECOND. 


MORRISON  I.  SWIFT. 


PUBLISHED    BY 

THE  LIBERTY  PRESS 

PHILADELPHIA 
1905 


Price,   Twenty- Five    Cents 


BY  MORRISON    I.  SWIFT. 


The  Monarch  Billionaire  .  .  .-  .  $1,00 
Imperialism  and  Liberty  .  .  .  .  1.50 
Problems  of  the  New  Life  .  .  .  .  /.  oo 

Our  Right  to  Rob  Robbers 25 

Grimple*  s  Mind 25 

Vicarious  Philcftithrophy          .  .  .10 

Capitalists  are  the  Cause  of  the   Unemployed      .05 

A   Tramp  in  California 05 

Education   Under  Millionaires         .         .  .05 


HUMAN 
SUBMISSION 


SECOND. 


BY 

MORRISON  I.  SWIFT. 


PUBLISHED    BY 

THE  LIBERTY  PRESS 

PHILADELPHIA 
1905 


Price,   Twenty- Five    Cents. 


COPYRIGHT,    1905,    BY 
MORRISON    I.    SWIFT. 


CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.    THE  TRUE  KEY  OF  THIS  UNIVERSE k  .  .   3 

II.    HUMAN  RACE  REPRESSION  THROUGH  SUBMISSION 14 

III.  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SUBMISSION 23 

IV.  MANUFACTURING  THE  SLAVISH  INSTINCT  IN  MAN 30 

V.  A  SLAVE'S  ONE  DUTY  is  TO  WIN  FREEDOM  AT  ANY  COST  .  37 

VI.    SLAVES  HAVE  NO  HUMAN  DUTIES  TO  MASTERS 43 

VII.    MANKIND'S  FALSE  EVOLUTION 46 

VIII.    MODERN  QUASI-SLAVERY  is  ANCIENT  SLAVERY  DISGUISED  50 

IX.    THE  INHERITED  SLAVISHNESS  OF  AMERICANS 62 

X.    BLOSSOMS  OF  SERVILITY —AMERICAN  REPOSE  UNDER  ROB- 
BERY   68 

XI.    ALL  LAWS  ARE  ANNULLED  BY  STARVATION 74 

XII.    HIGHER  LAW  THAN  PROPERTY:  SHALL  THE  POOR  STEAL 

FROM  PRINCIPLE  ? 85 

XIII.  THE  MURDER  LAWS  OF  PROPERTY 89 

XIV.  ARE  WE  VERGING  ON  REVOLUTION?  ...  .94 


INTRODUCTORY  NOTE. 

As  yet  there  exists  no  satisfactory  work  on  the  theme  of  Human 
Submission.  Yet  the  part  this  principle  has  played  in  the  affairs  of  man 
is  absolutely  primary.  It  is  the  lost  or  undiscoved  key  to  the  philosophy 
of  human  history,  and  when  its  importance  is  recognized  all  history  will 
have  to  be  revised  under  its  light. 

Our  philosophy  of  man  and  all  our  opinions  of  what  is  to  be  done 
will  likewise  change      It  is  not  intended  to  be  implied  in  these  pages 
that  non-resisters  from  principle  are  not  brave  men  ;  it  is  shown  that  in 
practical  results  the  doctrine  ends  where  cowardice  does.     Part  I,  whose  V 
title  is  Our  Servile  Religion,  has  not  yet  been  published.     The  subject   ^\ 
of  Part  III  is,  The  Confiscation  of  Wealth.  / 

15856$  ''*? 


x^VVJr>J 

ff  OF  THE 

(   UNIVERSITY 


v 


HUMAN    SUBMISSION. 


CHAPTER  I. 

THE   TRUE   KEY   OF   THIS   UNIVERSE. 

There  is  nothing  that  a  religious  philosopher  keeps  at 
such  a  distance  as  the  actual  facts  of  life.  But  while  these 
philosophers  go  their  way  ignoring  the  actual  and  indeed 
very  ignorant  of  it,  the  people  are  going  their  way  and  leav- 
ing philosophers  to  their  little  artificial  world  of  old  texts, 
desks,  and  lecture  rooms,  and  they  are  making  up  their  own 
minds  about  c  god  '  and  religion,  a  very  different  mind  from 
what  the  scholastic  thinkers  would  like  them  to  have. 
Yet  the  main  light  on  whatever  god  there  may  be  is  not 
thrown  by  the  nature  of  Being,  of  which  the  philosophers 
are  so  competent  to  speak,  nor  by  the  nature  of  Conscious- 
ness, but  by  the  things  happening  to  men  every  day  in  this 
sphere  of  god's  power  and  love.  And  knowing  full 
well  the  commiseration  I  shall  inspire  in  philosophers 
for  thinking  of  these  mere  events  and  drawing  de- 
ductions from  them,  I  lay  them  down  as  the  First 
Principles  from  which  any  theory  of  the  universe  must  be 
drawn.  If  we  eliminate  consciousness  from  the  universe  I 
do  not  know  of  what  consequence  its  existence  is,  and  if 
consciousness  is  the  greatest  thing,  the  way  this  universe 
uses  every  conscious  being  is  our  test  of  the  universe. 

When  these  facts  are  presented  to  the  philosopher  he  will 
be  contented  by  saying,  "but  suffering  is  not  the  only 
postulate  whence  our  moral  nature  starts ;  it  is  also  the 
discipline  through  which  it  gains  its  true  elevation."  *  But 

*Martineau,  A  Study  of  Religion ,  ii,  100. 


4  Human  Submission. 

how  will  this  strike  the  sufferer  ?  And  men  of  fineness  can 
sharply  realize  the  sufferer's  point  of  view.  Will  they  fol- 
low the  proclamation  of  another  philosopher,  who  says: 
"To  the  question,  then,  how  evil  consists  with  the  good- 
ness of  God  ?  I  answer  flatly,  it  does  not  consist  with  the 
goodness  of  God.  Either  there  is  no  God,  such  as  we 
figure  him,  or  there  is  no  evil.  Pain  and  suffering  in 
abundance,  but  no  evil.  For  only  that  is  really  and  abso- 
lutely evil  which  is  ...  evil  in  its  issues,  evil  for  evermore. 
Nothing  in  God's  universe  answers  to  that  condition."  * 

Only  a  philosopher,  and  a  religious  philosopher  at  that, 
could  make  this  assertion.  Who  knows  anything  about 
good  or  evil  for  evermore  f  Who  is  familiar  with  c  God's 
universe '  beyond  the  immoral  medley  of  it  here  ?  Is  there 
then  no  evil  ?  Let  us  try  to  conceive  how  men  who  are 
neither  philosophers  nor  proprietors  of  the  planet  would 
answer  this  question. 

I  have  already  cited  one  fact  of  Being  where  two  refined 
women  ended  their  lives  through  poverty  ;  this  I  should  call 
reality,  and  now  let  us  continue  the  study  of  the  universe 
and  of  reality  on  these  lines.  On  the  llth  of  October, 
1904,  the  press  contained  some  curious  information  from 
Cleveland,  Ohio : 

"  After  murdering  his  two  children,  John,  aged  three,  and 
Emma,  aged  four,  Bohunil  Schnepp,  a  Bohemian  laborer, 
aged  forty-one,  made  an  unsuccessful  attempt  on  his  own 
life  at  the  grave  of  his  wife  in  Woodland  Cemetery  here. 
He  is  now  in  a  local  hospital,  where  the  doctors  say  he  will 
recover.  Schnepp  has  vainly  searched  for  weeks  for 
employment,  and,  becoming  discouraged  over  the  pros- 
pect of  not  being  able  to  provide  a  home  for  himself  and  his 

*  F.  H.  Hedge,    Ways  of  the  Spirit,  243-245.     Quoted  by  Martineau, 
ii,  60. 


True  Key  of  the   Universe.  5 

two  motherless  babies,  he  yesterday  decided  to  blot  out  the 
entire  family. 

"  He  took  the  two  children  into  the  basement  of  his  board- 
ing house,  where,  after  tying  handkerchiefs  tightly  over 
their  mouths  so  that  they  could  make  no  outcry,  he  fired  a 
shot  from  an  old  revolver  into  each  of  their  heads.  The 
bullets  failing  to  kill  instantly,  he  seized  an  old  hammer 
which  was  lying  nearby  and  struck  the  children  on  the  skull 
behind  the  temple.  The  two  bodies  were  then  placed  side  by 
side  on  the  floor,  while  the  frantic  father  went  to  the  cemetery 
where  the  body  of  his  wife  was  buried.  There,  with  the 
pistol  he  had  used  on  his  babies,  he  fired  a  shot  into  his  head. 

"  He  was  picked  up  unconscious  and  hurried  to  the  hos- 
pital, where  examination  revealed  the  fact  that  the  bullet 
had  missed  the  brain  and  that  he  would  recover.  In  the 
meantime  the  bodies  of  his  unfortunate  victims  had  been 
found,  Emma  being  dead  and  John  dying  within  half  an 
hour.  Schnepp  left  a  letter  in  which  he  stated  that  he 
c  had  nothing  left  to  do '  but  kill  himself ;  that  he  now 
'  had  a  job  in  hell  as  a  fireman '  and  asked  that  he  and  the 
children  be  buried  in  the  same  grave." 

This  phenomenon  happened  in  a  world  whose  God  is 
Love.  In  New  York  an  old  man  starved  to  death  :  "  Two 
shoemakers,  Michael  and  Jacob  Buthren,  both  more  than 
70  years  old,  have  been  living  in  a  rear  tenement  in  Gates 
Avenue,  Brooklyn.  To-day  the  police  were  notified  by 
neighbors  that  something  was  wrong  with  the  old  men. 
They  visited  the  house  and  found  Michael  dead  and  his 
brother  Jacob  lying  half  conscious  and  barely  alive  by  his 
side.  Both  were  victims  of  starvation.  It  is  impossible  to 
say  how  long  they  had  been  without  food,  but  it  must  have 
been  several  days."  * 

*Dec.  17,  '03. 


6  Human  Submission. 

A  tailor  in  Philadelphia  paid  his  debts  and  took  poison, 
writing,  u  The  other  world  may  be  just  as  bad."  "  Max 
Horn,  a  tailor,  fearing  that  he  would  become  blind  and  so 
be  thrown  out  of  work  committed  suicide  yesterday,  at  920 
South  Street,  by  drinking  carbolic  acid.  He  had  been 
troubled  with  weak  eyes  for  some  time,  and  had  been  unable 
to  work  at  his  trade.  This  note  addressed  to  the  man  with 
whom  he  lived,  was  found  in  the  suicide's  room  : 

"  '  Friend  Witkin — I  leave  you  30  cents  for  two  suppers, 
Sunday  and  Monday,  that  belongs  to  you.  Excuse  me, 
friends,  for  the  trouble,  but  I  couldn't  help  myself.  I  hope 
you  will  excuse  me.  I  want  you  to  sell  all  my  clothes  and 
buy  me  new  ones  for  the  grave.  I  wish  you  good-by  and 
good  luck  from  me.  Yours  truly,  HORN. 

"  c  The  world  aint  more  for  me.  The  other  world  may  be 
just  as  bad.  MAX  HORN.'"  * 

Charles  Lorsch,  a  Brooklyn  sculptor,  about  30  years  old, 
and  married,  in  a  fit  of  despondency  committed  suicide  in 
the  woods  of  Valley  Stream,  L.  I.,  by  drinking  carbolic 
acid.  A  letter  denying  application  for  work  was  on  his 
person. f  Another  smashed  a  window  and  stole  in  order  to 
go  to  jail  and  get  a  home.  "  James  Anderson,  alias  Camp- 
bell, a  slender,  thinly  clad  man,  about  40  years  old,  who 
smashed  a  window  of  the  store  of  C.  De  Young,  at  Front 
Street  and  Girard  Avenue,  with  a  coupling  pin  done  up  in 
cotton  waste,  on  Sunday,  and  gathered  up  watch  chains, 
rings  and  other  jewelry,  valued  at  $50,  but  was  overtaken 
before  he  ran  very  far,  was  accused  before  Magistrate 
Kochersperger,  at  the  City  Hall,  yesterday,  of  also  having 
shattered  a  window  of  the  store  of  W.  Eisele,  2905  Frank- 
foid  Avenue,  and  stolen  four  watches.  ll  plead  guilty  to 

*  Philadelphia  ledger,  Jan.  14,  1903. 
f  Brooklyn  Eagle,  July  20,  1903. 


True  Key  of  the   Universe.  7 

both  charges/  said  Anderson  calmly,  when  the  police  said 
they  had  found  Eisele's  watches  in  his  pockets  when  they 
caught  him  with  the  plunder  from  the  other  store.  1 1  was 
cold  and  hungry  and  up  against  hard  luck.  I  knew  I  would 
be  fed  and  kept  warm  in  prison,  so  I  smashed  both 
windows.' "  * 

"  John  Kenny,  40  years  old,  of  328  East  Thirty-second 
Street,  who,  on  April  7th,  robbed  a  woman  and  then  shot 
two  men  who  interfered,  was  sentenced  to  State  prison  for 
fifteen  years  by  Judge  Cowing  yesterday.  In  an  affidavit 
which  Kenny  filed  with  the  Court,  he  stated  that  at  the  time 
he  committed  the  robbery  he  had  been  two  days  without 
food,  and  that  the  revolver  with  which  he  shot  the  two 
men  was  intended  to  end  his  life  if  he  did  not  find  employ- 
ment speedily."  f 

The  clerk  class  is  not  spared  :  "  After  trudging  through 
the  snow  from  one  end  of  the  city  to  the  other  in  the  vain 
hope  of  securing  employment,  and  with  his  wife  and  six 
children  without  food  and  ordered  to  leave  their  home  in 
an  upper  east  side  tenement  house  because  of  non-payment 
of  rent,  John  Corcoran,  a  clerk,  to-day  ended  his  life  by 
drinking  carbolic  acid.  Corcoran  lost  his  position  three 
weeks  ago  through  illness,  and  during  the  period  of  idleness 
his  scanty  savings  disappeared.  Yesterday  he  obtained  work 
with  a  gang  of  city  snow  shovelers,  but  he  was  too  weak 
from  illness  and  was  forced  to  quit  after  an  hour's  trial  with 
the  shovel.  Then  the  weary  task  of  looking  for  employ- 
ment was  again  resumed.  Thoroughly  discouraged,  Cor-' 
coran  returned  to  his  home  late  last  night  to  find  his  wife 
and  children  without  food  and  the  notice  of  dispossession 
on  the  door."  On  the  following  morning  he  drank  the 
poison. 

*  Philadelphia  Ledger,  Jan.  13,  '03. 
t  N.  Y.  Times,  April  29,  '04. 


8  Human  Submission. 

The  records  of  many  more  such  cases  lie  before  me  ;  an 
encyclopedia  might  easily  be  filled  with  their  kind.  These 
few  I  cite  as  an  interpretation  of  the  universe.  "  We  are 
aware  of  the  presence  of  God  in  His  world,"  says  a  writer  in 
a  recent  English  Review.  "  The  Absolute  is  the  richer  for 
every  discord,  and  for  all  diversity  which  it  embraces,"  says 
F.  H.  Bradley  (Appearance  and  Reality,  204).  He  means 
that  these  slain  men  make  the  universe  richer,  and  that  is 
Philosophy.  But  while  Professors  Royce  and  Bradley  and 
a  whole  host  of  guileless  thoroughfed  thinkers  are  unveil- 
ing Reality  and  the  Absolute  and  explaining  away  evil  and 
pain,  this  is  the  condition  of  the  only  beings  known  to  us 
anywhere  in  the  universe  with  a  developed  consciousness 
of  what  the  universe  is.  What  these  people  experience  is 
Reality.  It  gives  us  an  absolute  phase  of  the  universe.  It 
is  the  personal  experience  of  those  most  qualified  in  all  our 
circle  of  knowledge  to  have  experience,  to  tell  us  what  is. 
Now,  what  does  thinking  about  the  experience  of  these 
persons  come  to  compared  with  directly,  personally  feeling 
it,  as  they  feel  it?  The  philosophers  are  dealing  in  shades, 
while  those  who  live  and  feel  know  truth.  And  the  mind 
of  mankind — not  yet  the  mind  of  philosophers  and  of  the 
proprietary  class — but  of  the  great  mass  of  the  silently 
thinking  and  feeling  men,  is  coming  to  this  view.  They 
are  judging  the  universe  as  they  have  heretofore  permitted 
the  heirophants  of  religion  and  learning  to  judge  them. 

By  looking  into  the  large  end  of  a  telescope  real  life  can 
be  put  far  off  and  made  small.  Until  modern  science 
began  its  work  the  minutiae  of  the  world,  the  mere  actual- 
ities and  facts,  the  things  that  took  place,  were  looked  on 
with  supercilious  contempt.  But  the  soul  and  essence  of 
science  was  its  determination  to  see  these  things  just  as 
they  are,  and  to  exact  the  laws  of  the  Real  from  them.  But 


True  Key  of  the   Universe.  9 

this  work  has  not  yet  been  done  of  human  experience  in 
common  life.  It  has  been  done  of  animals  as  far  as  possible 
in  their  common  life,  but  man  has  not  yet  been  discovered 
of  importance  "enough  to  have  it  done  for  him.  Instead  of 
this  the  beautiful  vague  immensities  of  Being,  Essence, 
God-Fatherhood,  Sonship,  Eternal  Life,  and  the  "  for  ever- 
more," are  erected  out  of  consciousness  into  their  place. 
They  are  like  moving  pictures  which  simulate  the  real. 
But  all  these  are  inventions,  shadows,  thought-clouds, 
originating  in  our  faculty  for  despising  the  near,  the  present, 
the  actual ;  yes,  and  due  to  the  proprietary  estimate  of  the 
common  human  being's  worthlessness,  for  the  philosopher 
is  not  above  the  standards  of  his  proprietors  and  his  age. 

And  yet  all  progress  of  man  has  been  the  calling  of  him- 
self in  from  the  wilderness  of  fancy  in  which  his  mind 
could  aimlessly  roam,  to  close  and  home  and  palpable  rela- 
tions. The  highly  intelligent  eschew  dreams  and  come  to 
that  which  is  supreme  actuality,  humble  things  as  they 
are.  And  this  Cleveland  workingman,  killing  his  children 
and  himself,  is  one  of  the  elemental,  stupendous  facts  of 
this  modern  world  and  of  this  universe.  It  cannot  be  glozed 
over  or  minimized  away  by  all  the  treatises  on  God,  and 
Love,  and  Being,  helplessly  existing  in  their  haughty 
monumental  vacuity.  This  is  one  of  the  simple  irreducible 
elements  of  this  world's  life  after  millions  of  years  of  divine 
opportunity  and  twenty  centuries  of  Christ.  It  is  in  the 
moral  world  like  atoms  or  sub-atoms  in  the  physical,  prim- 
ary, indestructible.  And  what  it  blazons  to  man  is  the 
impotence  of  religion  in  its  very  essence,  and  the  imposture 
of  all  philosophy  wThich  does  not  see  in  such  events  the 
consummate  factor  of  conscious  experience.  These  facts 
invincibly  prove  religion  a  nullity.  Man  will  not  give 
religion  two  thousand  centuries  or  twenty  centuries  more 


10  Human  Submission. 

to  try  itself  and  waste  human  time ;  its  time  is  up,  its  pro- 
bation is  ended.  Its  own  record  ends  it.  Mankind  has 
not  aeons  and  eternities  to  spare  for  trying  out  discredited 
systems  of  life. 

The  impassable  truth  shown  is  that  not  only  the  Chris- 
tian motive  but  the  religious  motive  at  its  largest,  has  not 
been  sufficient  to  change  men  and  the  world.  They  have 
lent  themselves  to  systems  about  what  is  behind  life,  sys- 
tems of  organized  guesses,  and  the  mere  actual,  that  which 
is  known  and  felt,  they  have  despised.  Behold  the  incal- 
culable mind-energy  that  has  gone  into  elucidating  "God," 
Being,  Christ's  relation  to  God,  and  God's  relation  to  man  ; 
and  after  it  all  a  Cleveland  workingman  has  to  kill  his  babies 
and  himself  in  the  presence  of  and  in  spite  of  these  majestic 
essences !  Who  that  takes  real  things  into  account  will 
believe  a  word  of  these  colossal  lucubrations  when  he  sees 
what  transpires  in  this  moral  universe  of  the  Great  Abso- 
lute ?  "  What  is  man  that  thou  art  mindful  of  him  ?  "  Why 
the  answer  is,  thou  art  not  mindful  of  him.  Thou  permit- 
test  him  to  die  like  the  weed,  though  with  all  the  fiery 
sorrow  that  a  sentient  being  can  feel. 

Certainly  this  presentation  will  have  no  point  nor  com- 
prehensibility  to  those  who  deal  in  Being,  subsensible 
Reality,  and  Theories  of  Knowledge.  In  their  schemes 
that  poor  Ohio  man  filled  a  benevolent  place  in  the  Eternal 
Order  and  Moral  Process.  He  was  to  find  his  highest  self- 
realization  and  therefore  contentment  and  happiness  in 
killing  his  children,  because  the  Divine  Process  could  dis- 
cover no  food  for  them.  Such  is  the  immensity  of  Being 
and  the  profundity  of  Universal  Love  that  they  needed  his 
heartbreak  to  fulfil  the  mighty  concatenation  of  infinite 
connections. 

But  all  this  to  intelligences  that  come  home  from  In- 


True  Key  of  the   Universe.  11 

finity  to  what  palpably  Is,  must  be  pure  and  sheer  babble, 
as  meaningless  as  the  mediaeval  tournaments  in  Essence — 
how  many  angels  could  gyrate  on  the  needle's  point. 
However  absurd  it  may  be  in  the  realm  of  Being  and  Be- 
coming, Godhead  and  God  made  Flesh,  to  men  of  simple 
and  direct  minds  the  murder  and  suicide  of  that  man  whom 
all  Religion  could  not  provide  with  means  to  live  in  this 
reekingly  rich  country,  shows  with  finality  the  poverty  and 
impotency  of  the  religious  motive  for  human  life. 

Religion  is  like  a  sleep-walker  to  whom  actual  things 
are  blank.  Let  us  offer  its  consolations  to  this  Cleveland 
toiler,  to  all  those  other  Americans  dead  of  want  in  the 
bosom  of  riches  :  "  And  as  creation  was  a  moral  act  all  its 
motives  and  ends  were  in  God,  for  only  so  could  they  be 
worthy  of  Him.  These  motives  and  ends  were  those  of 
the  supreme  good.  God  willed  being  that  He  might  wih 
beatitude.  The  willing  was  a  sovereign  act,  but  the 
motives  and  ends  made  the  act  paternal."  * 

Thus  speaks  religion,  but  in  no  higher  note  speaks  Phi- 
losophy. It  turns  its  face  away  from  the  realities  to  battle 
through  long  tomes  with  imaginary  figments.  "  Applied 
philosophy,"  its  formulators  tell  us,f  "  is  like  practical 
religion.  It  illumines  life,  but  it  gives  no  power  to  use  the 
arts  of  the  medicine  man."  And  how  does  it  illumine? 
"  Religious  faith  involves  no  direct  access  to  the  special 
counsels  of  God  ;  but  it  inspires  the  believer  with  assur- 
ance that  all  things  work  together  for  good,  and  endows 
him  with  readiness  to  serve  in  his  station  the  God  who  is 
All  in  all.  Such  religion  is  ....  the  wisdom  to  find  in  all 
things,  however  obscure,  or  fragmentary,  the  expressions, 
however  mysterious,  of  the  Divine  Love.  The  faith  of  the 

*  Fairbairn,  The  Place  of  Christ  in  Modern  Theology,  p.  439. 
t  Josiah  Royce,  The  World  and  the  Individual,  ii,  pp,  6-9. 


12  Human  Submission. 

devout ....  makes  them  glad  to  suffer,  and  willing  to  wait ; 
and  sure  that  however  far  off  God  seems,  he  actually  is 
near." 

This  is  a  beautiful  summary  of  that  ignoble  resignation 
and  acceptance  which  is  all  that  religion  can  offer  us  against 
the  blows  of  nature.  Coerce  your  mind  and  subdue  your 
insight,  ignore  realities  and  inwardly  assert  that  the  storms 
of  evil  beating  down  man  are  mysterious  expressions  of 
Divine  Love. 

And  likewise  philosophy:  uThe  Theory  of  Being  re- 
quires us  to  view  every  fact  of  nature,  and  of  man's  life, 
as  a  fragmentary  glimpse  of  the  Absolute  life,  as  a  revela- 
tion, however  mysterious  and  to  us  men  now  in  detail 
illegible,  of  the  unity  of  the  perfect  Whole."  "  Philosophy 
does  not  create  men,  but  reflectively  considers  their  life." 
"  We  have  to  do  primarily  with  human  nature  as  it  is." 

The  illuminations  of  religion  and  of  philosophy  are 
then  identical,  and  the  secret  of  both  is  Faith.  Devoutly 
believe  that  the  universe  is  Divine  Love  and  a  Perfect 
Whole.  And  now  let  us,  as  before  we  did  with  religion, 
apply  the  doctrine  of  philosophy  to  facts.  When  the 
obscure  Cleveland  workman,  having  vainly  searched 
through  weeks  for  employment,  took  his  two  children  into 
the  basement  of  his  boarding  house  and  tying  handker- 
chiefs over  their  mouths  fired  a  shot  from  an  old  revolver 
into  each  of  their  heads,  and,  failing  to  kill  them,  ham- 
mered their  skulls  in  beneath  the  temple,  we  had  'a  frag- 
mentary glimpse  of  the  Absolute  life,'  '  a  revelation  of  the 
unity  of  the  perfect  Whole.'  We  had,  I  think,  on  the  con- 
trary a  perfectly  clear  glimpse  of  what  any  one  not  besotted 
by  the  concepts  of  philosophy  would  call  Absolute  Imper- 
fection, and  of  a  universe  in  which  the  attributes  of  hate 
and  hell  were  in  cruel  supremacy.  And  neither  philosophy 


True  Key  of  the   Universe.  13 

nor  religion  will  much  longer  avail  with  intellectual  char- 
latanry and  sophistries  to  restrain  mankind  from  so  reason- 
ing and  seeing.  When  it  does  so,  a  change  in  its  princi- 
ples of  action"  like  that  of  the  passage  from  an  old  to  a 
new  universe  will  transpire. 

Ethics  follows  at  the  tail  of  philosophy  and  religion. 
uThe  joys  of  a  good  conscience,"  says  Wundt,  ufar  ex- 
celling all  other  sources  of  happiness,  are  so  great  that  the 
really  moral  man  is  entirely  satisfied  with  the  position 
assigned  him  by  Fate  :  he  would  not  change  places  with 
any  one."  * 

Patiently  bringing  our  facts  to  bear  upon  this  quaint  aca- 
demic thinker's  fiction,  the  working  man  who,  crazed  by 
starving  and  seeing  his  boy  and  girl  whom  he  could  not 
feed  pining  and  dying  before  his  eyes,  with  no  commissera- 
tion  from  God  or  man  or  moralist,  crushed  out  their  brains, 
would  have  been  *  entirely  satisfied  with  the  position 
assigned  him  by  Fate,'  nor  would  he  have  changed  places 
with  anyone ;  for  up  to  the  time  when  the  frenzy  seized 
him  he  must  surely  have  had  a  good  conscience,  since  for 
weeks  he  had  zealously  pursued  the  mocking  phantasies 
of  employment  and  honest  food.  Thus  the  ethical  writer 
with  the  mysteries  of  his  science  can  reduce  the  utmost 
misery  that  a  human  being  can  know  to  a  joy  far  excell- 
ing all  others ;  he  can  make  the  most  horrible  fate  con- 
ceivable to  man  identical  with  his  highest  bliss.  But  he 
does  more :  he  demonstrates  that  ethics  is  an  archaic  exer- 
cise of  modern  school-masters  hundreds  of  years  in  arrears, 
that  its  message  to  the  present  and  to  the  future  is  dead. 

*  Ethics  (Tr.)iii,  89. 


14  Human  Submission. 

CHAPTER  II. 

HUMAN   RACE   REPRESSION   THROUGH   SUBMISSIVENESS. 

What  is  the  cause  of  this  uniform  and  dreary  sterility  in 
three  great  fields  ?  Philosophy  and  ethics,  like  religion, 
are  under  dominion  of  the  world's  accepted  structure. 
They  are  all  fettered  to  the  despotism  of  man  over  man 
which  the  first  savage  slave-catcher  inaugurated.  They 
have  accepted  their  fundamental  structure  from  the  nature 
of  human  society  as  it  has  been  since  long  before  reflection 
began,  and  their  thinking  will  be  but  idle  relics  when  this 
stage  is  transcended. 

The  philosophic  method  is  to  begin  with  human  experi- 
ence and  to  then  eliminate  or  obscure  whatever  would 
undermine  the  existence  of  a  proprietary  class.  For  in  no 
other  way  can  the  procedure  of  the  universe  be  justified  or 
made  to  appear  commonly  humane.  And  as  the  mission  of 
philosophy  is  to  justify  the  universe,  it  is  compelled  to 
justify  its  iniquities  and  the  nearer  causes  of  those  iniqui- 
ties. Not  only,  then,  is  it  indifferent  and  passive  to  the 
overwhelming  sum  of  human  wrong,  but  it  evolves  systems 
in  which  the  greatest  things  of  life  are  reduced  to  nothing 
and  the  remote  things  made  all,  systems  therefore  totally 
untrue.  These  three  great  streams,  Religion,  Philosophy 
and  Morals,  joined  and  have  flowed  together  to  effect  the 
submission  and  abasement  of  man.  And  the  ill  they 
wrought  to  the  race  in  doing  so  has  been  infinite.  Let  us 
briefly  trace  this  evil  through  history  to  the  present 
moment. 

The  condition  of  man  before  slavery  was  essential  equal- 
ity. Out  of  the  property  and  class  differences  which  sla- 
very introduced  grew  the  monarchic  tribe.  Having  exam- 
ined most  of  those  now  existing  in  the  different  savage 
races  of  the  globe,  L,etourneau  finds  that  "  always  and 


Race  Repression  Through  Submissiveness*          15 

everywhere,  we  see  inequality  of  possessions  coinciding 
with  crying  abuses  of  force  and  prerogative ;  everywhere 
the  disinherited  or  despoiled  are  at  the  mercy  of  the  wrell- 
to-do,  who  unscrupulously  abuse  their  advantages.  It  is 
only  here  and  there  that  we  find  the  greater  humanity  of 
[earlier]  ancient  custom  still  protesting  against  this  mass 
of  tyranny."  *  This  was  the  parent  soil  of  present  nations. 
At  a  certain  stage,  in  a  wandering  tribe  of  Jews,  our 
table  of  commandments  crystallized.  It  was  the  formal 
moral  code  of  a  small  population  differing  in  every  aspect 
from  the  great  nations  which  subsequently  throve.  In  this 
miniature  and  energetic  community  tyranny  and  repression 
were  decisively  limited,  compared  with  their  play  in  bulkier 
states  and  those  which  carne  later.  Greek  philosophy  and 
the  Hebrew  religion  plus  this  moral  code,  united  in  Chris- 
tianity, which  became  the  religion  and  the  ethical  law  of 
the  Western  world,  with  conditions  stupendously  changed. 
Commandments  perhaps  excellent  for  the  migratory  clan  or 
modest  little  nation  of  Jews  where  the  oppressor  could  be 
held  in  some  check,  became  in  huge  machine  empires  the 
lethal  potion  which  killed  the  instinct  for  rights  and  love 
of  liberty  in  the  best.  '  Thou  shalt  not  steal,  neither  shalt 
thou  covet,'  are  suitable  precepts  in  a  state  of  equality,  but 
in  a  social  mechanism  framed  as  Rome  was  for  the  spolia- 
tion of  the  many,  they  are  advices  to  the  many  to  meanly 
fall  down  and  be  pillaged.  The  masters  of  the  empire 
were  a  predatory  ruling  corporation  organized  to  extract 
and  consume  the  honey  of  their  subjects.  There  were 
natural  resisters  of  these  predacious  'tyrants — they  were 
those  highest  minded  men,  who  would  be  drawn  to  the  ideal 
and  become  Christians.  But  as  soon  as  they  did  so  the 
false  prescriptions  of  Christianity  destroyed  their  zeal  for  a 

*I,etourneau.     Property  ;  Its  Origin  and  Development,  106. 


16  Human  S^lbmiss^on. 

right  and  beatific  world,  substituting  an  empty  metaphy- 
sical righteousness  and  a  heaven  of  fancy  to  run  away 
to.  The  world  needed  at  that  time  a  religion  of  uncom- 
promising resistance  to  tyrants,  whether  they  were  political 
or  commercial,  a  religion,  philosophy,  and  morality  that 
would  permit  the  righteous  to  allow  the  despoilers  of  men 
no  peace  or  safety.  Instead,  they  were  put  to  sleep  and  to 
death  by  the  dogmas  of  fallacious  righteousness. 

Swift,  in  a  passage  of  tremendous  import,*  depicting 
spirits  summoned  up  through  necromancy  from  the  dead, 
signalizes  his  opinion  of  the  type  of  men  needed  by  the 
world.  "  The  governor,  at  my  request,  gave  the  sign  for 
Caesar  and  Brutus  to  advance  towards  us.  I  was  struck 
with  a  profound  veneration  at  the  sight  of  Brutus,  and 
could  easily  discover  the  most  consummate  virtue,  the 
greatest  intrepidity  and  firmness  of  mind,  the  truest  love  of 
his  country,  and  general  benevolence  for  mankind,  in  every 
lineament  of  his  countenance,  I  observed  with  much 
pleasure,  that  these  two  persons  were  in  good  intelligence 
with  each  other ;  and  Caesar  freely  confessed  to  me,  that 
the  greatest  actions  of  his  own  life  were  not  equal  by  many 
degrees,  to  the  glory  of  taking  it  away.  I  had  the  honor  to 
have  much  conversation  with  Brutus ;  and  was  told  that 
his  ancestor  Junius,  Socrates,  Epaminondas,  Cato  the 
younger,  Sir  Thomas  More,  and  himself,  were  perpetually 
together :  a  sextumvirate,  to  which  all  the  ages  of  the 
world  cannot  add  a  seventh.  ....  I  chiefly  fed  mine  eyes 
with  beholding  the  destroyers  of  tyrants  and  usurpers,  and 
the  restorers  of  liberty,  to  oppressed  and  injured  nations." 
Into  this  list  Swift  would  certainly  accept  the  colossal 
modern  figure  of  John  Brown. 

All  of  the  other  virtues  are  pale  in  comparison  with  this 

*  Gulliver's  Travels:    Voyage  to  L,aputa,  ch.  vii. 


Race  Repression   Through  Submissiveness.  17 

of  resistance  to  those  who  tyrannize  in  any  form  over  men. 
Real  ethics  has  therefore  not  yet  begun  to  be.  We  have 
had  children's  ethics,  children's  religion,  and  children's  phi- 
osophy — but  not  those  appertaining  to  men.  And  because 
the  servile  religion  and  ethics  blinded  and  unnerved  the 
natural  lovers  of  justice,  the  conditions  of  human  life  bear 
still  a  close  resemblance  to  their  original  in  the  savage 
tribe,  as  Letourneau  depicted  it.  What  we  find  in  the  two 
great  Anglo-Saxon  countries,  England  and  America,  is  the 
accomplished  degradation  of  a  huge  segment  of  the  popula- 
tion and  the  advancing  degradation  of  still  more.  The 
population  is  steadily  rushing  to  cities.  Booth  found  in 
London  thirty  per  cent,  of  the  people  below  the  poverty 
line,  and  Rowntree,  investigating  the  smaller  city  of  York, 
discovered  about  twenty-eight  per  cent,  in  that  condition, 
below  the  line  of  physical  efficiency.  And  now,  keeping  in 
mind  Letourneau's  exposition  of  monarchic  tribes  of  sav- 
ages :  "  everywhere  the  disinherited  or  despoiled  are  at  the 
mercy  of  the  well-to-do,  who  unscrupulously  abuse  their 
advantages,"  let  us  learn  from  Rowntree  what  a  life  on  the 
border  of  mere  physical  efficiency  is. 

"  A  family  living  upon  the  scale  allowed  for  in  the  esti- 
mate must  never  spend  a  penny  on  railway  fare  or  omnibus. 
They  must  never  purchase  a  halfpenny  newspaper  or  spend 
a  penny  to  buy  a  ticket  for  a  popular  concert.  They  must 
write  no  letters  to  absent  children,  for  they  cannot  afford 
to  pay  the  postage.  They  must  never  contribute  anything 
to  their  church  or  chapel,  or  give  any  help  to  a  neighbor 
which  costs  them  money.  They  cannot  save,  nor  can  they 
join  sick  club  or  trade  union,  because  they  cannot  pay  the 
necessary  subscriptions.  The  children  must  have  no  pocket 
money  for  dolls,  marbles  or  sweets.  The  father  must  smoke 
no  tobacco  and  must  drink  no  beer.  The  mother  must 


18  Human  Submission. 

never  buy  any  pretty  clothes  for  herself  or  for  her  children. 
Should  a  child  fall  ill,  it  must  be  attended  by  the  parish 
doctor ;  should  it  die,  it  must  be  buried  by  the  parish.  If 
any  of  these  conditions  are  broken  the  extra  expenditure 
involved  is  met,  and  can  only  be  met,  by  limiting  the  diet ; 
or,  in  other  words,  by  sacrificing  physical  efficiency." '.* 

Is  such  a  life  worth  living?  That  this  shocking,  savage 
condition  is  due  to  a  craven  morality,  a  nursery  philosophy, 
and  a  servile  religion,  mere  facts  will  gradually  convince. 
It  is  due  to  their  denial  of  facts  and  their  studied  perver- 
sion of  facts  to  suit  their  pre-established  doctrines ;  to  that 
false,  pernicious  and  cowardly  canon  of  non-resistance 
which  is  the  core  of  them  all. 

Let  us  follow  the  facts  on  to  their  climax.  Race  dete- 
rioration in  Great  Britian  is  at  last  acknowledged,  when  so 
great  a  proportion  of  military  applicants  are  rejected  for 
their  inferior  physique  that  the  fighting  power  of  the  nation 
is  menaced.  The  decay  of  these  citizens  did  not  ruffle  the 
serenity  of  the  proprietary  classes  while  the  mob  con- 
tinued to  produce  the  required  able-bodied  men  to  serve  as 
destroyers  and  destroyed  for  the  political  and  commercial 
schemes  of  this  class.  No  love  of  man,  no  concern  for 
fellow-citizens  dying  of  a  degradation  imposed  by  the  pro- 
prietors, moved  these  dominant  rich :  only  when  their 
basest  selfish  interests  were  threatened  did  they  stir ;  it 
then  became  patent  that  they  were  starving  their  slavish 
servitors  beyond  the  point  of  their  own  vantage  and  they 
were  frightened.  The  British  commission  found  the  infant 
mortality  among  the  poor  to  be  alarming.  Now  the  British 
poor  are  neither  provided  with  employment  nor  paid  enough 
to  enable  them  to  live  decently,  much  less  to  bring  up 

*  See  "Science  and  Poverty"  by  Champness,  in  the  Westminster  Re- 
view, Oct.,  '04. 


Race  Repression  Through  Submissiveness.  19 

decent  children,  what  is  theirs  being  confiscated  for  the  ex- 
cessive consumption  of  the  proprietary  masters.  But  the 
commission  has  no  idea  of  mitigating  the  cause  and  chang- 
ing the  status  of  the  poor,  it  proposes  to  make  these  de- 
graded parents  quasi-convicts,  to  force  them  to  work  out 
penally  a  debt  to  the  state  in  payment  for  the  state's  rearing 
of  their  children  in  the  manner  which  society  prevents 
them  from  doing  voluntarily.  "  In  the  last  resort,"  says 
this  absurd  proprietary  commission,  "  this  might  take  the 
form  of  labor  colonies  on  the  lines  of  the  Salvation  Army 
Colony  at  Hadleigh,  with  powers,  however,  of  compulsory 
detention.  The  children  of  persons  so  treated  might  be 
lodged  temporarily  in  public  nurseries  or  boarded  out. 
With  a  view  to  the  enforcement  of  parental  responsibility, 
the  object  would  be  to  make  the  parent  a  debtor  to  society 
on  account  of  the  child,  with  the  liability,  in  default  of  his 
providing  the  cost  of  a  suitable  maintenance,  of  being 
placed  in  a  labor  establishment  under  State  supervision 
until  the  debt  is  worked  off."  And  this  inevitable  degen- 
eration of  the  increasing  mass  of  poor  is  taking  place  in 
all  Anglo-Saxon  cities. 

In  Bngland  and  America  a  rapid  annual  increase  of  in- 
sanity is  at  length  admitted,  though  naturally  with  exces- 
sive reluctance ;  for  it  is  a  damning  indictment  of  our  reli- 
gious and  moral  civilization,  striking  where  there  is  the 
least  possibility  of  evasion.  The  strain  upon  the  wealth- 
producers,  creating  riches  not  for  their  own  evolution  but 
for  the  intemperate  debauching  luxury  of  the  proprietors, 
is  the  primary  cause.  The  producer  is  unable  to  feed  him- 
self and  family  as  he  should  ;  in  this  abnormal  under- 
mining physico-mental  state  he  takes  to  stimulants  and 
deadly  vice.  On  their  side,  steeped  in  selfishness  in  every 
department  of  their  natures  from  their  position  as  despoilers 


20  Human  Submission. 

of  the  producer,  the  proprietors  steadily  advance  in  deprav- 
ing luxury  and  hideous  brutalizing  pleasure- worship.  The 
riches  of  the  nation  are  consumed  in  degrading  their  pos- 
sessors. Here  then  is  the  resulting  law  of  modern  society  : 
Popular  degradation  advances  in  direct  ratio'  with  the 
seizure  of  general  wealth  by  the  Rich.  The  rich  are  there- 
fore  a  centre  of  blood-poisoning  which  ultimately  corrupts 
and  destroys  the  social  body.  The  health  of  society  lies  in 
amputating  the  rich. 

The  Russian  masses  lost  their  faith  in  the  Czar  when  he 
had  them  butchered  on  the  way  to  appeal  to  him  for  help. 
When  it  breaks  upon  the  American  mind  that  the  rich  are 
the  great  centre  of  social  poisoning,  the  last  grain  of  faith 
in  their  utility  will  depart,  and  they  will  be  impeached  and 
their  state  abolished.  In  this  will  consist  their  amputa- 
tion. These  rich  are  fanatics  in  their  belief  that  the 
American  people  will  never  do  anything  to  them,  even 
when  they  rend  and  expose  each  other  they  anticipate  no 
popular  retribution.  Nothing  will  do  more  to  dissipate 
the  senseless  glamour  which  protects  them  than  the  cer- 
tainty that  they  buy  and  own  American  laws  and  law- 
makers. Thomas  Lawson,  corrupt  though  he  is  by  con- 
fession, has  done  good  work  here.  His  character  does  not 
impugn  the  truth  of  his  story,  an  honest  man  could  not 
have  entered  the  ring  of  rascals  as  he  did,  learning  their 
profligate  villainies  by  sharing  them  ;  but  the  thing  is,  his 
explicit  personal  charges  against  the  Massachusetts  law- 
makers and  Boston's  ( great '  citizens  like  Henry  M. 
Whitney  and  his  accomplices,  could  not  be  ventured  unless 
they  were  true.  He  deposes  thus  of  the  bribers  and 
bribed :  "  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say,  then :  The  Massachu- 
setts Legislature  is  bought  and  sold  as  are  sausages  and 
fish  at  the  markets  and  wharves.  That  the  largest,  wealthiest,. 


Race  Repression   Through  Submissiveness.  21 

and  most  prominent  corporations  in  New  England,  whose 
affairs  are  conducted  by  our  most  representative  citizens, 
habitually  corrupt  the  Massachusetts  Legislature,  and  the 
man  of  wealth  among  them  who  would  enter  protest 
against  the  iniquity  would  be  looked  on  as  a  '  Class  Anar- 
chist.' I  will  go  farther  and  say  that  if  in  New  England 
a  man  of  the  type  of  Folk,  of  Missouri,  can  be  found  who 
will  give  over  six  months  to  turning  up  the  legislative  and 
Boston  municipal  sod  of  the  past  ten  years,  who  does  not 
expose  to  the  world  a  condition  of  rottenness  more  rotten 
than  was  ever  before  exhibited  in  any  community  in  the 
civilized  world,  it  will  be  because  he  has  been  suffocated 
by  the  stench  of  what  he  exhumes."  * 

I  am  citing  these  facts  not  as  novelties  to  surprise  the 
few  who  have  not  read  of  them,  but  to  show  their  bearings 
on  the  greatest  problems  that  confront  man.  I  wish  to 
show  how  the  highest  modern  gentleman  is  the  very  image 
of  his  olden  antetype  thousands  over  thousands  of  years 
ago.  H.  M.  Whitney  is  one  of  New  England's  most  emin- 
ent and  influential  gentlemen,  standing  in  the  front  rank 
of  the  American  proprietary  type.  I  doubt  if  a  single  one 
of  that  magisterial  troop  would  hesitate  to  do  as  he  does. 
And  Lawson  says  Whitney  was  the  star  "  fixer  "  of  legis- 
latures ;  the  most  accomplished  briber  of  them  all.  uWhat 
were  legislatures  for,  anyway,  but  to  be  '  fixed  '  ?  "  leading 
Boston  gentlemen  of  the  highest  culture  and  Christian 
standing  inquired  of  Lawson. 

As  between  the  monarchic  tribal  chief  and  American 
chiefs  like  Whitney,  the  difference  is  purely  in  the  length 
of  the  intermediate  chain  between  their  acts  and  the  visible 
consequences.  Civilization's  greatest  and  characteristic 
invention  is  machinery  for  concealing  the  evil  doer.  Civil- 

*  I^awson's  Magazine  Article  of  Dec.  '04. 


22  Human  Submission. 

ization  is  increasing  complexity  of  robber  strategems.  By 
lengthening  the  intermediate  chain  it  throws  the  injured 
populace  off  of  the  scent.  And  the  modern  world  is  not 
offended  by  a  consciousness  of  the  utmost  savagery  flourish- 
ing in  its  midst ;  what  offends  it  is  to  have  this  savagery 
spoken  of. 

With  a  people  bred  in  a  religion  or  philosophy  of  intelli- 
gence, the  succession  of  enormities  and  scandals  I  have 
sketched — the  crucial  stupendous  facts  of  modern  man- 
kind— would  lead  to  an  instant  conflagation,  wiping  out 
every  trace  of  the  wrong.  The  infamous  men  who  are 
corrupting  American  life  and  degrading  the  race,  far  worse 
and  more  iniquitous  than  the  Catilines  of  old,  would  be 
assembled  in  penal  colonies  to  expiate  their  crimes  by  use- 
ful labor.  The  perpetrators  of  these  acts,  the  legislators 
and  the  eminent  proprietors,  whom  Swift  with  his  merciless 
exactness  would  call  ua  knot  of  peddlers,  pickpockets, 
highwaymen  and  bullies,"  would  be  no  longer  endured  at 
large  among  men,  again  to  plot  their  contamination. 

But  how  is  it  under  our  Submissive  religion  and  philoso- 
phy ?  The  situation  is  treated  with  amusement  and  satire 
by  the  proprietary  press,  and  that  is  all  so  far  as  anything 
can  be  publicly  observed.  The  people,  religiously  subdued 
to  slavish  instincts  for  ages,  will,  many  of  them,  experience 
some  throbbings  of  molten  rage,  but  they  will  think  that 
it  is  evil  to  feel  so ;  the  religious  inhibition  checks  every 
impulse  to  eradicate  primary  wrongs,  criminal  righteous- 
ness  abolishes  the  play  of  their  reason,  and  they  do  nothing. 

But  if  intelligence  cannot  work  openly  and  redeem, 
a  subterranean  hatred  slowly  accumulates.  It  was  this 
which  produced  the  French  revolution.  Submission  again 
achieved  the  saddle  after  that  revolt,  but  we  must  not  for- 
get that  submission  is  strong  with  aeons  of  instinct.  Slowly 


Origin  of  Submission.  23 

growing  hate  does  in  time  most  recklessly  what  intelligence 
would  do  at  once  with  healing  skill.  And  we  arrive  at  the 
strange  discovery,  that  under  a  submissive  religion,  a 
religion  of  canting  affected  love,  all  great  and  real  progress 
comes  through  hate.  This  is  the  measureless  penalty  we 
pay  for  obedience  to  the  corpse-like  mandates  of  antiquity. 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE   ORIGIN    OF   SUBMISSION. 

The  full  origin  of  submission,  however,  is  what  it  con- 
cerns us  practically  and  particularly  to  know.  For  it  long 
antedates  the  later  religions  and  explains  why  their  foun- 
ders so  naively  mistook  submissiveness  for  virtue.  These 
religions  came  late  and  found  and  confirmed  a  state  of 
human  wretchedness  already  institutionalized  and  trace- 
able in  weighty  measure  to  this  principle  of  submission. 
Hence  its  origin  will  throw  new  light  on  all  our  surviving 
institutions  and  morals. 

Far  back  in  the  hazy  beginnings  of  human  society  a 
differentiation  of  men  took  place  into  warriors,  and  con- 
trivers or  producers.  The  warriors  were  the  most  brutal 
and  domineering  and  less  gifted  ;  the  contrivers  and  inven- 
tors were  they  in  whom  superior  qualities  of  brain  were 
starting.  These  new  excellencies  of  mind  were  slight  and 
rudimentary,  yet  they  were  the  beginnings  of  higher  man. 
Their  possessors  saw  how  life  might  be  improved  and  pro- 
ceeded to  improve  it,  their  interest  being  rather  in  work 
and  production  than  in  war,  enslaving  and  killing ;  they 
were  the  intellectuals  of  the  time,  the  scientists,  the  invent- 
ors, the  creators,  and  among  their  discoveries  was  agricul- 
ture. They  thought  and  worked.  Here  the  greatest  of  all 


24  Human  Submission. 

errors  ever  committed  by  mankind  arose.  These  men,  the 
less  violent,  brutal,  blood-thirsty,  and  selfish,  relaxed  their 
self-protecting  vigilance,  and  permitted  a  division  of  labor; 
they  gravitated  to  the  higher  and  peaceful  arts  and  gave 
over  the  business  of  war  to  the  baser,  duller  sort  who  inher- 
ently thirsted  for  slaughter ;  they  let  down  their  guard, — 
and  the  result  was  that  the  truculent  killing  breed  took 
command,  and  they  were  subjugated.  This  sealed  the 
subjugation  of  brains  to  force  for  all  time,  making  brain 
the  errand  boy  of  brute  force.  Far  from  setting  intellect 
free  to  develop  by  differentiation  and  division  of  labor  as 
writers  teach,  it  dealt  the  evolution  of  brain  an  irremedi- 
able blow.  For  it  raised  Power  over  brain  as  its  mentor, 
and  made  the  higher  intellect  a  minion  of  Might.  And 
this  degrading  office  intelligence  has  always  meekly  filled, 
with  dumb  mean  gratitude  for  even  tolerance  to  exist. 

The  contrivers  and  producers,  having  permitted  the  func- 
tion of  self-protection  to  slip  from  them,  could  no  longer 
enforce  their  voice  in  public  affairs,  they  lost  respect  and 
their  wisdom  was  ignored,  they  were  relegated  to  the  de- 
spised condition  of  producing  for  and  serving  the  others. 
Now  this  put  an  extinction  on  the  evolution  of  wisdom. 
Who  would  give  himself  to  creative  arid  productive  ideas 
only  to  be  rewarded  for  it  by  reduction  to  slavery  ?  Only 
the  less  intelligent,  those  barely  above  the  brutal  warriors, 
who  were  lacking  in  spirit.  The  higher  intellects  with 
spirit  would  spurn  a  peaceful  creative  career  phis  slavery 
and  would  join  the  warrior  caste  and  fall  in  with  the  domi- 
nant brutal  crowd  and  become  identical  with  them.  The 
productive,  progressive  ideas  evolved  would  not  be  in  any 
manner  those  of  the  best,  but  of  the  third  and  fourth  rate 
intelligences,  hardly  capable  of  having  ideas,  and  only 
such  would  the  brute  warrior  class  allow ;  the  highest 


Origin  of  Submission.  25 

minds  would  be  sterilized,  they  would  give  up  thoughts 
of  progress,  but  if  any  foolhardy  one  did  attempt  to  run 
counter  to  the  brute  majority  he  would  meet  with  quick 
suppression. 

Such  was  the  outcome  of  the  division  into  warrior  and 
productive  types.  The  growth  of  intellect  was  at  once 
checked  and  permanently  stunted ;  it  was  tied  to  the  will 
of  the  turbulent,  bloody-minded  and  stupid — the  destroyers  ; 
thenceonward  they  were  the  custodians  of  intellect  and 
decided  what  it  might  do ;  the  intelligence,  the  soul,  the 
dawning  humanity,  had  to  come  on  bended  knee  to  these 
self-appointed  negaters  and  nullifiers  to  plead  permission  to 
improve  man,  with  exceeding  small  hope  of  being  heard. 
Here  was  where  that  repression  which  later  expanded  into 
an  earth-girdling  system  sustained  by  dastardly  armies  and 
linked  by  a  thousand  low  laws  saw  first  the  light.  Here  is 
the  key  to  human  history  and  its  religion  and  philosophy. 

The  two  movements  creative  of  submission  went  side 
by  side  and  united  their  effects.  The  captured  slaves 
accepted  their  servitude  and  consented  to  produce,  sup- 
porting the  warriors  their  owners ;  this  ratified  their  sub- 
inissiveness  and  its  evolution  in  their  posterity,  entailing 
on  both  all  the  cumulative  consequences.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  intelligent  peacefully-inclined  drifted  away  from 
warlike  activity,  accepted  production  as  their  status,  and 
the  warriors  as  their  rulers ;  essential  slavery  became  also 
their  lot ;  for  where  they  differed  from  the  captured  slave 
in  privilege  or  immunity,  they  were  in  no  sense  free  men, 
equal  to  these  power-wielding  warriors,  but  were  servile 
both  in  station  and  mind.  The  conquering  caste  ruled 
them.  Their  freedom  was  the  price  they  paid  for  seeking 
intelligent  improvement  of  human  ways.  They  who  pre- 
ferred peace  and  industry  to  war  were  enslaved  or  enserfed. 


26  Human  Submission. 

What  was  their  mistake  !  Submission  to  this  state.  We 
may  call  it  their  crime  against  man.  It  was  a  crime 
against  all  good  and  hope  anywhere.  The  intelligent 
should  have  preserved  their  warlike  capacity  to  protect 
themselves  against  the  brutes  of  their  race  and  faithfully 
exercised  it.  They  should  have  compelled  the  warrior 
type  to  do  their  half  of  the  productive  work  or  die.  They 
should  have  forced  the  truculent  to  support  themselves,  and 
thus  prevented  an  exclusive  warrior  caste,  the  progenitors 
of  all  tyranny  and  tyrants.  All  would  have  partaken  in 
war  when  necessary.  This  would  have  changed  the  brutal 
into  a  peaceful  type.  Allowance  to  war  and  enslave  ad 
libitum,  continually  evolved  a  keener  brutality.  What  we 
have  missed  in  our  reading  of  nature  and  antiquity  is,  that 
perfect  brutality  awaited  the  advent  of  man.  The  accepted 
theory  is  that  brutality  lessened  in  man,  the  truth  is  it 
began  its  real  evolution  in  man.  And  it  did  so  because  the 
better  type  yielded.  The  better  sunk  into  pusillanimous 
torpor,  they  established  an  heredity  of  good  cowards.  It 
is  absurd  to  say  that  the  more  intelligent  could  not  have 
held  their  own  against  the  brutes  if  they  had  adhered  to 
the  practice  of  arms  in  co-ordination  with  industry :  the 
fact  of  their  superior  brains  would  have  certified  success. 
They  would  then  have  held  brutality  down  and  begun  its 
extirpation.  As  it  was  there  were  none  to  resist  the  man- 
brutes,  they  absolutely  had  their  way  and  used  the  whole 
world  to  rampage  in.  In  this  perfect  environment  for  it, 
brutality  started  on  a  limitless  evolvement.  The  increas- 
ing brain  of  man  was  brutality's  new  propulsion  and  man's 
strengthening  faculties  steadily  widened  its  field.  This 
was  inevitable  because  the  conquering  caste  controlled 
evolution  and  their  brute  instincts  would  direct  its  course. 

The  evolution  theory  which  assumes  on  the  whole   the 


Origin  of  Submission.  27 

constant  advance  of  man  is  very  far  wrong.  The  progress 
of  marts  brain  for  countless  ages  was  almost  nothing  biit 
the  exercise  of  brutalities  unknown  to  4  lower '  creation  and 
depending  on  semi-marts  greater  brain  power.  All  these 
exercises  became  structural  in  man's  brain  and  are  there 
yet  explaining  man's  far  deeper  than  brute  baseness.  They 
explain  man's  inability  to  see  the  infamy  of  the  resultant 
structure  of  human  life  as  we  accept  it,  and  his  callousness 
to  its  horrors  when  he  does  see.  It  is  because  human  evo- 
lution did  not  go  right,  but  switched  to  the  wrong  almost 
in  the  very  outstart. 

Faithful  evolutionists  surmise  that  this  differentiation 
into  warrior  caste  and  peaceable  dependent  supporters  of 
them  tended  to  purify  the  race  of  its  blood-thirsty  stock ; 
they  refer  to  it  as  far  the  most  potent  cause  of  the  advance 
of  peace-loving  industry.  For  they  say  wars  naturally 
attracted  the  turbulent  and  bloody-minded  and  killed  them 
off,  so  gradually  cleansing  mankind  of  their  tribe ;  which 
they  call  another  beneficent  instance  of  natural  selection. 
The  reasoning  is  mainly  fallacious.  Before  being  killed 
masses  of  this  type  left  offspring  as  bloodily  bent  as  them- 
selves. To  the  progeny  of  wedlock  must  be  added  the  sol- 
diers' illegitimates  springing  up  in  the  track  of  their  wars. 
The  law  of  the  warrior  is  license  ;  which  also  is  part  parent 
of  the  dictum,  civilzation  is  syphilization. 

But  war  and  the  rule  of  the  conquering  caste  were  the 
apotheosis  of  the  war  trade  and  the  war  kind  of  society ; 
which  having  established  themselves  put  men  through  their 
brutal  mould,  nurturing  their  ferocity  and  extinguishing 
their  higher  traits,  shaping  them  for  tyranny,  rapacity, 
cruelty  and  butchery ;  so  that  while  some  were  being 
destroyed,  a  constant  stream  developed  by  the  brutal  social 
ideal  more  than  replenished  their  sort.  And  those  who 


28  Human  Submission. 

by  the  war-structure  of  human  communities  were  thus 
degraded  would  otherwise  have  evolved  in  the  direction  of 
peace,  industry,  invention  and  intelligence.  The  same 
process  is  exhibited  by  all  the  western  nations  to-day  in 
commercializing  their  children.  Commercial  rapacity  is 
the  dominant  law  of  civilized  materialized  mankind,  man- 
kind life-killing  and  idealless,  and  numberless  youths 
capable  of  nobility  and  worthy  work  in  the  world  are  in- 
cessantly sucked  down  into  the  commercial  vortex  where 
they  smother  their  souls  in  the  prevailing  baseness.  The 
military  ideal  continues  its  domination  and  corruption  even 
in  these  latest  times,  ever  feeding  the  war  type  with  new 
material  and  countervailing  any  tendency  there  is  in  selec- 
tive forces  to  purify  the  race  of  blood-thirstiness  by  killing 
the  blood-thirsty  out. 

In  modern  times  moreover  there  is  not  even  the  shadow 
of  selection  operating  to  kill  the  blood-thirsty  out.  With 
the  great  standing  armies  in  which  all  able-bodied  citizens 
must  serve,  a  war  simply  destroys  men  at  random,  striking 
every  type.  The  civil  war  in  the  United  States  decisively 
lowered  the  quality  of  the  American  race.  The  plurality 
of  the  survivors  emerged  more  or  less  debased  and  brutal- 
ized by  their  experiences  ;  many  who  might  have  grown  in 
personality  spent  their  strength  in  the  conflict  and  remained 
stationary  the  rest  of  their  lives ;  and  cohorts  of  the  best 
and  least  war-loving  were  killed.  Taking  the  nation  as  a 
whole,  its  quality  very  decidedly  sunk.  And  we  have  the 
most  glaring  proof  that  it  did.  The  baser  sort  shrewdly 
seized  the  occasion  to  speculate  on  the  nation's  misery  and 
batten  on  its  needs;  they  did  not  offer  to  fight  and  they 
were  not  weeded  out  by  natural  selection  ;  they  took  gov- 
ernment contracts  and  otherwise  trafficked  and  peddled  to 
grow  rich.  When  the  struggle  was  over  they  had  a 


Origin  of  Submission.  29 

deteriorated  population  to  cope  with  ;  many  of  the  more 
spirited  and  intelligent  were  dead  and  still  more  were  cor- 
rupted ;  and  the  commercial  plotters  found  the  weakened 
nation  soft  prey.  The  events  of  the  past  forty  years  indi- 
cate how  soft :  a  handful  of  absolutely  selfish  unscrupulous 
creatures  absolutely  control  and  mostly  own  the  wealth  and 
productive  industries  of  the  States  ;  they  have  quietly  taken 
the  property  away  from  the  rest.  And  a  veritable  army 
of  Americans,  many  of  them  no  doubt  descendants  of  civil 
war  soldiers,  are  living  in  actual  semi-starvation,  while 
other  large  masses  are  being  intellectually  and  morally 
starved  by  care  and  poverty.  The  terrific  words  of  Tiberius 
Gracchus  to  the  plucked  Romans  might  well  be  embla- 
zoned before  these  truly  expatriated  sons  of  the  American 
Commonwealth. 

"  The  wild  beasts  of  Italy,"  he  said,  "  have  their  dens  to 
retire  to,  but  the  brave  men  who  spill  their  blood  in  her 
cause  have  nothing  left  but  air  and  light.  Without  homes, 
without  settled  habitations,  they  wander  from  place  to  place 
with  their  wives  and  children  ;  and  their  generals  do  but 
mock  them  when  at  the  head  of  their  armies  they  exhort 
their  men  to  fight  for  their  sepulchres  and  the  gods  of  their 
hearths,  for  among  such  numbers  there  is  perhaps  not  one 
Roman  who  has  an  altar  that  has  belonged  to  his  ancestors 
or  a  sepulchre  in  which  their  ashes  rest.  The  private 
soldiers  fight  and  die  to  advance  the  wealth  and  luxury  of 
the  great,  and  they  are  called  masters  of  the  world  without 
having  a  sod  to  call  their  own." 

It  is  memorable  that  the  Roman  proprietors  did  not  dis- 
gorge,that  through  the  action  of  submission  the  labor-loving 
and  best  were  totally  expropriated  and  servilized,  that  the 
worst  survived  and  ruled  the  empire  in  rottenness,  and  that 
finally  the  whole  structure  crumbled  from  this  cause.  Be- 


30  Human  Submission. 

hind  the  cause  of  extortion  and  expropriation  which  is 
often  enough  designated,  was  the  real  cause,  submission. 
The  Roman  people,  far  outnumbering  the  proprietary 
extorters,  were  under  the  spell  of  an  idea  which  verily  has 
been  the  prime  and  original  curse  of  the  human  race — 
Submission.  Through  it  the  best  have  been  prevented  from 
surviving  ;  it  has  maintained  the  survival  and  perpetuation 
of  the  worse. 

CHAPTER  IV. 

MANUFACTURING  THE   SLAVISH   INSTINCT   IN   MAN. 

Man's  mind  having  been  cast  through  interminable  time 
in  the  slavish  submissive  mould,  it  is  a  well-nigh  miracu- 
lous feat  for  him  to  step  out  of  his  mental  rigidity  and  see 
what  his  past  and  present  slavishness  is.  But  if  he  can 
contemplate  a  picture  of  himself  in  the  animal  world,  a 
feeling  of  realization  and  even  shame  may  invade  him.  He 
will  find  this  picture  in  Darwin's  Origin  of  Species  under 
"  Slave-making  Instinct ;  "  and  it  shows  not  only  the  meet 
and  sure  fruits  of  pusillanimous  submission,  but  the  saving 
potency  of  a  spirited  resistance. 

This  remarkable  instinct,  says  Darwin,  was  first  dis- 
covered in  the  Formica  rufescens  by  Pierre  Huber.  "  This 
ant  is  absolutely  dependent  upon  its  slaves ;  without  their 
aid,  the  species  would  certainly  become  extinct  in  a  single 
year.  The  males  and  fertile  females  do  no  work  of  any 
kind,  and  the  workers  or  sterile  females,  though  most 
energetic  and  courageous  in  capturing  slaves,  do  no  other 
work.  They  are  incapable  of  making  their  own  nests,  or 
feeding  their  own  larvse.  When  the  old  nest  is  found 
inconvenient,  and  they  have  to  migrate,  it  is  the  slaves 
which  determine  the  migration,  and  actually  carry  their 
masters  in  their  jaws.  So  utterly  helpless  are  the  masters, 


Manufacturing  the  Slavish  Instinct.  31 

that  when  Huber  shut  up  thirty  of  them  without  a  slave, 
but  with  plenty  of  the  food  which  they  like  best,  and  with 
their  own  larvae  and  pupae  to  stimulate  them  to  work,  they 
did  nothing;  they  could  not  even  feed  themselves,  and 
many  perished  of  hunger.  Huber  then  introduced  a  single 
slave  (F.  fusca),  and  she  instantly  set  to  work,  fed  and  saved 
the  survivors ;  made  some  cells  and  tended  the  larvae,  and 
put  all  to  rights."  "  What  can  be  more  extraordinary," 
Darwin  asks,  "  than  these  well-ascertained  facts  ?  If  we 
had  not  known  of  any  other  slave-making  ant,  it  would 
have  been  hopeless  to  speculate  how  so  wonderful  an 
instinct  could  have  been  perfected." 

What  is  far  more  wonderful  is  the  exact  parallel  of  human 
slavish  instincts.  Man  is  supposed  to  be  a  higher  being 
with  power  to  reflect,  but  the  very  superiority  of  his  mind 
employs  itself  to  cause  him  to  outslave  the  ant.  The  case 
at  its  simplest  is  the  conduct  of  the  black  slave  in  our  war. 
While  the  North  was  engaging  his  masters  in  the  field  he 
had  but  to  rise  collectively  and  walk  away  to  freedom. 
All  the  colored  population  could  have  migrated  to  the 
North,  instantly  extirpating  the  root  of  slavery.  Instead 
they  remained  and  cared  for  the  families  of  those  who  were 
fighting  to  keep  them  in  slavery,  raising  food  also  for  their 
masters'  armies.  Had  they  not  done  so  their  owners  would 
have  been  in  the  position  of  Huberts  thirty  ants,  they  could 
not  have  fed  themselves  and  their  families  and  fought,  the 
war  must  have  ceased  and  slavery  died.  But  the  slaves, 
like  F.  fusca,  c  set  to  work,  fed  and  tended  the  fighters  and 
their  offspring,'  and  as  far  as  they  could  (put  all  to  rights.' 
Is  not  this  more  astonishing  by  many  wide  degrees  than 
the  similar  performance  of  the  lowly  narrow-brained  ants  ? 
With  armies  contending  to  free  him  the  African's  instinct 
for  slavery  remained  as  impregnable  as  the  little  colored 
insects.' 


32  Human  Submission. 

But  we  need  not  draw  our  lesson  from  the  African,  for 
here  in  the  United  States  at  this  hour  the  sons  of  the  men 
who  had  freedom  are  exhibiting  a  more  astounding  example 
of  the  structural  deposit  of  the  aeons  of  slavishness  in  us. 
A  mere  handful  of  lawless  men,  with  the  utmost  sangfroid, 
take  possession  of  the  nation's  wealth,  expropriating  its 
owners  ;  they  are  void  of  title,  physical,  moral,  or  spiritual, 
to  do  so ;  it  is  a  work  of  dastardly  fraud  and  dishonor, 
bribery  and  crime,  from  its  inception  to  its  completion ; 
and  yet,  like  the  African  minion  in  the  cotton  field,  seventy- 
seven  million  whites  submissively  watch  the  process  move 
to  its  grand  and  deadly  consummation. 

Scientifically  speaking,  these  civilized  whites,  the  Ethio- 
pians, and  the  Formica  fusca  (ants)  are  on  the  same  level 
of  intelligence  and  courage.  And  perhaps  no  modern  fact 
is  more  illuminating  than  this.  The  minds  of  all  three 
types,  separated  apparently  though  they  are,  work  help- 
lessly in  the  one  iron  groove  ;  the  highest  equally  with  the 
lowest  wanting  elasticity  to  spring  out  of  it.  The  ants  in 
fact  are  higher  than  the  American  white  man.  For  we 
have  no  evidence  either  from  Huber  or  Darwin  that  the 
slave-making  ant  starves  its  slave  property,  whereas  in  the 
United  States  and  Europe  millions  of  the  expropriated  and 
merely  verbally  free  are  being  starved  by  their  masters. 
Superficially  considered  it  would  seem  that  the  ants  are 
more  willingly  degraded  than  their  human  confreres,  since 
the  owners  cannot  even  feed  themselves,  and  perish 
with  hunger  if  the  bounty  of  their  slaves  is  withdrawn. 
But  in  human  society,  likewise,  there  are  many  members 
of  the  proprietary  leisure  class  who  would  die  incontinently 
if  they  were  thrown  out  of  their  privileges  and  compelled 
to  struggle  for  their  livelihood.  Everything  has  to  be  done 
for  them  by  their  servile  providers  almost  to  feeding  them, 


Manufacturing  the  Slavish  Instinct.  33 

to  preserve  their  valueless  lives.  Darwin's  words  are  very 
apt  for  these  :  "  This  [human  ]  ant  is  absolutely  dependent 
on  its  slaves  ;  without  their  aid  the  species  would  certainly 
become  extinct  in  a  single  year." 

And  this  is  the  point.  So  deeply  built  into  man  is  the 
submissive  slavery  instinct  that  he  cannot  conceive  how  he 
could  possibly  stop  draining  his  life  to  care  for  masters  and 
mistresses  who  are  utterly  helpless,  who  are  powerless  to 
coerce  him,  who  would  become  as  a  species  instantaneously 
extinct  if  he  desisted  from  his  stupid  self-imposed  preserva- 
tion of  them.  Like  the  ant,  he  manufactures  his  masters. 
Taking  everything  into  consideration  this  is  the  most  stu- 
pendous paradox  in  the  animal  kingdom.  And  he  does 
this  from  intellectual  weakness,  the  fact  that  he  does  it 
showing  that  his  thought  power  in  the  highest  field  is  no 
farther  evolved  than  the  ant's. 

The  entire  proprietary  class  are  dependent  upon  their 
supporters  for  the  life  of  their  species.  They  could  not 
exist  as  proprietors  ( a  single  year '  without  the  sense  of 
obligation  to  work  for  and  keep  them  alive  which  the  great 
servile  horde  feels.  The  life  of  the  servile  crowd  is  there- 
fore expended  in  erecting  masters  and  keeping  them  in 
their  place.  Cessation  from  the  service  of  support  is  alone 
necessary  to  give  the  servile  their  liberty,  but  this  irrational 
sense  of  obligation  drives  them  blindly  to  their  posts,  and 
it  is  no  other  than  that  reasonless  slave  instinct  which 
hurried  the  solitary  ant  to  feed  and  preserve  its  owners. 
The  sense  of  obligation  is  here  seen  to  grow  as  readily 
about  a  depraving  instinct  as  with  an  ennobling  one.  And 
this  at  once  demolishes  the  value  of  the  feeling  of  obliga- 
tion. It  may  as  readily  be  an  impulse  radically  defiant  of 
man's  good  as  kindly  to  it.  The  sense  of  duty  may  be 
man's  greatest  injury  ;  it  not  only  may,  but  is  and  has  been 


34  Human  Submission. 

so  to  the  full  extent  of  its  operation  through  time  to  hold 
him  in  slavery  or  submissive  subjugation. 

It  is  one  of  the  prodigies  of  a  strange  branch  of  thought 
that  Kant  used  our  sense  of  duty  to  prove  man  free.  The 
sense  of  duty  has  held  the  immenser  portion  of  human  beings 
through  all  time  in  groveling  yokeage  to  other  human  beings, 
whose  right  to  hold  them  has  been  nil,  and  whose  power 
to  do  so  is  mainly  this  sense  of  obligation  in  the  dutiful ; 
but  to  a  great  philosopher  the  fact  of  this  enslaving  sense 
is  proof  that  man  is  a  free  agent.  The  essence  of  the  proof 
is  that  man  is  a  free  agent  because  he  has  a  sense  of  obliga- 
tion which  keeps  him  a  slave.  An  instinct  which  holds 
man  in  the  extremes  of  degradation  establishes  philoso- 
phically that  this  is  a  moral  universe  ruled  by  a  moral  god  ! 
Curiously  too  for  the  moral  character  of  the  god  which  this 
proves,  the  master's  divine  sense  has  been  his  sense  of 
duty  to  keep  his  co-mortals  in  the  bonds  of  despicable 
degradation. 

In  man  it  may  require  several  generations  to  manufacture 
the  moral  sense  to  wear  the  yoke,  or  one  generation  may 
suffice.  But  where  a  long  series  of  generations  has  wrought, 
each  hammering  man's  brain  to  practise  and  believe  in 
servility,  he  is  naturally  certain  with  all  the  impetus  of  his 
nature's  architecture  that  every  sanction  in  the  universe 
justifies  and  glorifies  and  commands  his  slavishness.  Then 
we  have  morality  as  it  has  been  for  many  centuries,  we 
have  philosophy,  we  have  religion,  and  we  even  have 
science  in  its  only  semi-emancipation,  backing  this  thread- 
bare ancient  trinity. 

The  ant's  pupae  are  captured  and  the  new-born  are 
trained  as  slaves  from  birth ;  they  have  no  memory  of  free- 
dom to  stimulate  them  to  freedom.  Neither  have  the 
•  children  of  most  men  any  memory  of  true  freedom  in  their 


Manufacturing  the  Slavish  Instinct.  35 

ancestral  line.  But  man  has  a  larger  brain  than  the  ant  and 
the  human  atmosphere  is  not  without  floating  ideas  of  the 
equal  rights  of  all  men.  Therefore  man's  sense  of  servility 
is  much  stronger  and  baser  than  the  ant's.  Still  the  con- 
science of  the  ant  is  sufficiently  strong,  as  another  species 
watched  by  Darwin  corroborates.  "  The  slaves  are  black 
and  not  above  half  the  size  of  their  red  masters,  so  that  the 
contrast  in  their  appearance  is  great.  When  the  nest  is 
slightly  disturbed,  the  slaves  occasionally  come  out,  and 
like  their  masters  are  much  agitated  and  defend  the  nest : 
when  the  nest  is  much  disturbed,  and  the  larvae  and  pupae 
are  exposed,  the  slaves  work  energetically  together  with 
their  masters  in  carrying  them  away  to  a  place  of  safety. 
Hence  it  is  clear,  that  the  slaves  feel  quite  at  home."  An 
ant  philosopher  of  the  slave-holding  tribe  following  this 
touching  domestic  drama,  and  propably  much  emotionally 
moved,  would  doubtless  record  that  the  slave  ants  had  no 
desire  or  capacity  for  freedom  and  were  much  better  off  as 
slaves.  So  record  human  slave-makers. 

In  the  cited  case  conscience  prevents  the  slave  from  run- 
ning away  when  he  gets  a  chance.  Indeed  it  is  likely  that 
his  conscience  is  so  vivid  that  he  never  thinks  of  running 
away.  He  is  worried  by  his  master's  troubles  and  lends  a 
hand  to  set  him  right — so  that  his  own  servitude  may  be 
resumed.  How  small  a  stretch  of  fancy  is  required  to  be- 
lieve that  a  Christianity  like  ours  has  been  delivered  to  the 
ants  ! 

I  said  that  the  ants  not  only  reproduce  human  servility 
in  a  wonderful  way,  but  that  they  shame  man  by  teaching 
him  how  superfluous  his  aeons  of  slavishness  have  been. 
If  he  had  gone  to  the  humble  ant  to  learn  he  might  have 
been  perpetually  free  though  all  the  sorry  ages  and  never 
have  suffered  and  smothered  beneath  their  sordid  pall. 


36  Human  Submission. 

One  day  Darwin's  '  attention  was  struck  by  about  a  score 
of  the  slave-makers  haunting  a  spot,  and  evidently  not  in 
search  of  food.'  They  attacked  a  community  of  the  slave- 
species  (F.  fusca)  and  were  repulsed.  Darwin  ( then  dug  up 
a  small  parcel  of  the  pupse  of  F.  fusca  from  another  nest, 
and  put  them  down  on  a  bare  spot  near  the  place  of  com- 
bat ;  they  were  eagerly  seized  and  carried  off  by  the  tyrants.' 
And  now  comes  the  revelation  of  the  saving  principles  we 
are  seeking :  "  At  the  same  time  I  laid  on  the  same  place 
a  small  parcel  of  the  pupse  of  another  species,  F.  flava, 
with  a  few  of  these  little  yellow  ants  still  clinging  to  the 
fragments  of  their  nest.  This  species  is  sometimes,  though 
rarely,  made  into  slaves,  as  has  been  described  by  Mr. 
Smith.  Although  so  small  a  species,  it  is  very  courageous, 
and  I  have  seen  it  ferociously  attack  other  ants.  In  one 
instance  I  found  to  my  surprise  an  independent  community 
of  F.  flava  under  a  stone  beneath  a  nest  of  the  slave-making 
F.  sanguinea ;  and  when  I  had  accidently  disturbed  both 
nests,  the  little  ants  attacked  their  big  neighbors  with  sur- 
prising courage.  Now  I  was  curious  to  ascertain  whether 
F.  sanguinea  could  distinguish  the  pupse  of  F.  fusca,  which 
they  habitually  made  into  slaves,  from  those  of  the  little 
and  furious  F.  flava,  which  they  rarely  capture  ;  and  it  was 
evident  that  they  did  at  once  distinguish  them  ;  for  we  have 
seen  that  they  eagerly  and  instantly  seized  the  pupse  of  F. 
fusca,  whereas  they  were  much  terrified  when  they  came 
across  the  pupcs,  or  even  the  earth  from  the  nest,  of  F.  flava, 
and  quickly  ran  away  ;  but  in  about  a  quarter  of  an  hour, 
shortly  after  all  the  little  yellow  ants  had  crawled  away, 
they  took  heart  and  carried  off  the  pupse."  * 

It  is  the  courageous  fury  of  these  little  beasts  against 
their  intending  enslavers  that  saves  them.     Nothing  else 

*  Origin  of  Species,  p.  218. 


A  Slaveys  One  Duty  is  Freedom.  37 

could  have  the  faintest  influence  on  ruthless  might;  but 
heroic  fury,  the  fiery  will  not  be  slaves,  protects  their  free- 
dom. 

CHAPTER  V. 

A   SLAVE'S   ONE   DUTY   IS   TO   WIN   FREEDOM 
AT   ANY   COST. 

And  this  fury  to  be  free  is  the  highest  and  first  quality, 
both  for  animals  and  man.  For  there  is  absolutely  no 
other  soil  in  which  true  virtues  can  grow.  The  virtues 
that  bud  in  any  form  of  servitude  are  spurious.  Nor  is 
chance  and  fortunate  freedom  that  priceless  soil  of  virtue, 
it  is  the  will  aud  furious  courage  to  preserve  freedom  at 
any  price  and  in  face  of  all  invasion,  which  is  its  sure  and 
only  soil.  Every  virtue  grown  in  servility  contains  the 
ingredients  of  servility.  A  servile  thing  is  not  a  man  but 
only  the  false  mimicry  of  one ;  he  can  do  nothing  and  be 
nothing  as  a  real  man  would.  He  has  committed  the  irre- 
trievable character  fault  of  suffering  himself  to  be  wrenched 
out  of  manhood  into  slavehood,  whereafter  he  conforms  no 
longer  to  the  high  free  true  laws  of  his  soul  but  moulds 
his  being  to  his  false  state  and  to  the  compelling  will  of 
abasers. 

And  slaves  are  in  no  sense  those  alone  who  are  bodily 
owned,  but  all  those  who  yield  to  a  condition  of  things 
where  others  deprive  them  of  their  own  and  limit  their 
rightful  good.  All  who  permit  themselves  to  accept  the 
servilage  of  modern  times,  inherited  from  original  craven 
submission  and  the  primeval  slave-catcher,  who  like  the 
slave  ant  support  others  without  an  equal  return,  these  are 
slaves,  these  may  have  all  the  virtues  of  the  Christian, 
Stoic  and  Buddhistic  calendars,  but  not  a  single  virtue  of 
them  all  is  real,  every  one  of  them  has  a  coarse  alloy,  is 


38  Human  Submission. 

mimic  and  counterfeit.  Because  a  real  man  cannot  be 
grafted  onto  the  stalk  of  a  slave.  His  thoughts  will  be  fed 
by  the  slave's  blood  and  crossed  with  the  slave's  thoughts. 
And  because  it  was  and  is  unnecessary  for  him  to  be  a 
slave. 

The  ants  taught  him  that ;  little  and  furious  F.  flava, 
who  taught  their  would-be  masters  so  piercing  a  lesson  by 
the  ferocity  of  their  resistance  that  the  tyrants  became  the 
cowards  and  cravens  and  ran  away  quivering  from  even  the 
earth  their  noble  adversaries  had  walked  on.  There  is  no 
other  such  tremendous  lesson  in  the  animal  or  human 
world.  This  ant  is  high  above  man,  not  only  in  the 
splendor  and  glory  of  moral  bravery  but  in  the  majesty  of 
his  intelligence,  with  which  mankind  has  nothing  to  com- 
pare. He  never  ceases  to  see  ;  his  very  constitution  abhors 
the  evolving  depravity  of  slavery  which  man  has  softly 
accorded  himself  to  like  wax.  The  accommodation  of 
man  to  his  enslavement  after  the  fact,  I  shall  show  to  be 
his  highest  wrongdoing. 

Doctors  of  divinity  and  morals  in  the  ant  kingdom  you 
may  be  sure  would  be  on  the  slave-maker's  side,  and  would 
reason  to  the  slave  class  as  follows :  '  You  are  now  cap- 
tured and  that  alters  the  moral  situation  entirely.  You  had 
a  right  before  capture  to  resist  to  the  death,  but  now  you 
have  no  more  right  to  resist ;  you  must  conform  yourselves 
to  the  laws  of  your  master  and  .your  slave  condition  and  do 
your  duty  in  it.  "  Servants  be  in  subjection  to  your  mas- 
ters with  all  fear ;  not  only  to  the  good  and  gentle,  but 
also  to  the  froward.  For  this  is  acceptable,  if  for  conscience 
toward  God  a  man  endureth  griefs,  suffering  wrongfully."  ' 
This  is  what  the  doctors  of  ant  divinity  would  say.  And 
if  the  slaves  asked  who  made  the  laws  of  our  condition,  the 
doctors  would  reply,  God. 


A  Slaves  One  Duty  is  Freedom.  39 

But  the  god  that  made  these  laws  we  know  was  the  mas- 
ter's diabolic  greed.  It  was  transposed  into  theology  by 
the  ant  theologians,  and  into  law  by  the  ant  lawyers  and 
legislators,  and  into  philosophy  and  science  by  the  ant 
philosophers  and  scientists,  all  of  them  slave-holders  or 
younger  sons  of  slave-holders,  or  at  least  paid  to  think  out 
of  their  bounty ;  and  the  essence  of  the  divinity,  the  law, 
the  philosophy  and  the  science  was  the  master's  insatiable 
greed. 

There  was  no  reason  why  the  ant  slave  should  have  made 
a  truce  with  the  master's  greed  after  capture.  If  he  cravenly 
did  so  that  truce  was  not  binding  on  the  slave  ant's  sons  or 
sons'  sons.  And  we  as  men  with  our  larger  minds  can 
easily  see  this.  Nor  could  this  cowardly  truce  be  binding 
on  the  thousandth  generation  of  slave  ants.  Nor  could  the 
status  or  habit  of  slavery  build  up  an  obligation  of  any 
kind  on  the  slave  or  his  descendants.  The  status  and 
habit  of  the  master  keeping  them  slaves  was 'a  perpetual 
repetition  of  the  first  act  of  enslaving  them.  There  never 
was  in  all  slave-ant  history  a  time  when  the  slave  owed  a 
solitary  duty  to  his  master.  Not  love,  not  fealty,  not  faith, 
not  one  moral  law.  But  he  always  owed  himself  the  duty 
of  breaking  the  yoke  and  of  killing  his  masters  to  do  it  if 
he  had  to.  For  he  eternally  owed  himself  freedom,  and  to 
teach  his  masters  that  slavery  could  not  be.  Looking 
down  into  the  deep  abyss  of  ant  inferiority  we  can  perceive 
at  a  glance  that  this  is  true  of  the  ants. 

What  is  the  difference  between  ants  and  men?  Why, 
that  it  is  all  infinitely  truer  of  men  because  of  their  superior 
possibility,  because  of  the  greatness  and  sacredness  of  every 
individual,  his  imprescriptible  right  and  duty  to  be  the 
whole  that  a  man  can.  And  whoever  says  that  a  slave  can 
be  all  that  a  man  can  must  be  the  son  or  the  salaried  singer 
of  a  slave-owner. 


40  Human  Submission. 

But  now  suppose  a  series  of  benevolent  transitions  in 
which  the  master  ants  found  that  they  could  get  more  out 
of  their  slaves  with  less  care  to  themselves  by  some  trans- 
formation of  slavery,  while  still  extorting  their  support  from 
the  slave-descendants  and  still  despising  them  as  an  inferior 
creation  and  holding  them  in  servile  dependence.  The 
formic  doctors  of  divinity,  science  and  commerce  would 
now  be  proving  to  the  modified  slaves  that  they  were  free 
and  that  all  the  blessings  of  life  were  resident  in  them 
because  they  were  no  longer  in  the  bodily  bondage  of  their 
progenitors.  They  would  be  proving  that  the  modified 
slaves  owed  loving  submission  to  present  extortion  because 
the  masters  had  found  it  necessary  and  profitable  to  discon- 
tinue certain  brutalities  connected  with  past  extortion. 
The  argument  runs,  If  the  ant  masters  cease  to  whip  and 
to  bind  their  modified  slaves  to  service  in  a  given  place,  the 
gratitude  of  the  slave  can  only  show  itself  properly  by  his 
continuance  to  serve  under  enduring  extortion  in  some 
place.  Formerly  he  was  whipped  or  killed  and  could  not 
choose  his  place,  now  he  is  not  whipped  and  can  choose  his 
place,  and  the  doctors  of  insect  divinity  and  science  inform 
him  with  scorn  that  if  he  isn't  willing  to  support  his  old  mas- 
ters' children  in  such  blessed  freedom  as  this  he  does  not 
deserve  to  live  at  all.  And  in  truth,  with  insect  shrewd- 
ness almost  comparable  to  man's,  the  masters  see  that  he 
does  not  live  if  he  will  not  work  out  his  gratitude  on  these 
terms,  for  he  gets  no  work  and  starves. 

Such  then  is  ant  civilization  and  it  makes  human  blood 
boil  to  think  of  the  injustice.  But  it  especially  ruffles  our 
sense  of  right  that  the  insect  doctors  of  religion  and  science 
should  trick  the  slave  descendants  with  such  flimsy  non- 
sense as  their  maudlin  arguments,  which  we  blame  even  a 
dull  ant  for  imbibing.  And  we  see  instantly  that  the  duty 


A  Slave's  One  Ditty  is  Freedom.  41 

of  the  slave-descendant  to  the  master-descendant  is  the 
same  as  that  of  his  captured  ancestors — to  be  free,  to  break 
the  transformed  yoke.  Obligation  to  work  for  him  on 
quasi-slave  terms  he  has  not ;  if  the  qualified  ant-master 
demands  this  service  he  is  merely  reasserting  the  original 
owner's  c  right,'  installed  by  murder  and  force  in  the  primi- 
tive insect  forest. 

And  now  turning  from  ants  to  men  to  see  if  there  is  any- 
thing to  alter  the  deduction,  we  recognize  that  there  is  not. 
A  person  who  consents  to  be  servile  to  another  breaks  the 
highest  law  of  the  universe  within  our  ken.  That  law  is 
expansion  with  the  greatest  celerity  iipon  the  highest  lines  of 
intelligence.  A  slave's  or  quasi-slave's  expansion  is  curbed 
by  the  iron  walls  of  denial  and  impossibility  which  crush 
him  down  ;  the  very  best  expansion  he  can  make  is  a  dis- 
tortion and  sham.  Let  a  man  first  give  his  supreme  atten- 
tion to  making  himself  and  all  men  free,  and  he  will  then 
begin  to  know  the  virtues  of  higher  nature. 

The  enslaved  should  have  been  perpetually  irreconcilable. 
Unceasing  war  against  their  enslavers  should  have  been 
the  law  of  their  being.  Force  and  death  were  the  instru- 
ments of  enslavement,  as  they  were  always  in  final  analysis 
the  naked  sustainers  of  it.  These  were  the  weapons  and 
only  weapons  for  the  slaves  to  have  fought  back  with ; 
for  the  duty  to  get  free  always  continued  as  stern  and  abso- 
lute as  the  duty  not  to  be  taken,  and  these  weapons  alone 
were  potent  there.  It  was  the  slaves'  and  their  posterity's 
to  have  established  the  certitude  that  slaves  could  not  be 
kept  with  safety  to  the  lives  of  the  masters.  Would  slavery 
and  qualified  slavery  ever  have  become  fixed  human  insti- 
tutions if  the  slaves  had  bided  their  time  and  destroyed 
their  masters  upon  the  first  opportunity  of  freedom  ?  Never, 
and  the  race  would  have  been  a  high  and  free  race  ages 


42  Human  Submission. 

gone  if  they  had  possessed  the  courage  so  to  behave.  And 
they  would  have  been  treating  the  masters  strictly  as  the 
masters  had  treated  them  or  their  forefathers,  merely  turn- 
ing the  tables,  not  however  to  establish  slavery,  but  to 
abolish  slavery  and  win  their  inalienable  right. 

For  this  law  of  action  should  have  descended  to  the  pos- 
terity of  slaves  as  long  as  enslavement  was  tried.  For  time 
did  not  annul  the  fact  that  slaves  were  slaves,  stunted  and 
defiled,  and  time  should  not  have  cooled  their  noble  fury 
to  regain  their  manhood  in  any  later  generation,  even  if  it 
needed  the  extermination  of  the  entire  slave-owning  tribe. 
Extermination  was  the  abiding  function  of  the  masters. 
They  exterminated  the  slave's  life  if  he  firmly  claimed  his 
valid  right  to  self-possession  ;  they  extirpated  his  higher 
faculties  unceasingly ;  which  authorized  the  slaves  to  ex- 
terminate them  under  any  circumstances  to  reach  liberty 
and  wipe  out  the  damning  institution.  No  lapse  of  time 
lessened  this  duty  a  jot. 

Nor  could  any  relation  which  grew  between  man  and 
master,  nor  any  affection,  nor  any  morals,  lessen  it.  Brutus 
was  a  friend  of  Caesar  but  he  killed  him  as  a  tyrant,  and 
Swift  rightly  says  this  far  outranked  in  greatness  all  of 
Caesar's  deeds.  And  what  did  the  affection  of  the  master 
for  the  slave  amount  to  if  the  master  would  not  grant  his 
slave  the  one  condition  for  becoming  a  man — freedom  ? 
The  relation,  the  affection,  the  code,  were  fraudulent. 
There  was  just  one  test  of  the  master's  honest  good  will — 
did  he  set  the  subjugated  free,  and  abrogate  the  state  of 
repression  ?  And  if  not,  he  was  but  murdering  every  day 
the  slave's  faculties  and  reasserting  the  original  assassina- 
tion of  life  which  founded  the  enslavement. 

Finally,  no  scheme  of  obligations,  morals,  laws  or  rela- 
tions which  evolved  out  of  this  criminal  situation  and  has 


W  m  V  C  ft  9  1  ! 

OF 


No  Human  Duties  to  Masters.  43 

overcast  modern  times,  resting  upon  and  assuming  servilage 
in  any  form,  is  binding  upon  the  servile.  If  they  accept 
these  unwarranted  bonds  of  servility  and  perform  their 
sham  (  duties,'  they  repeat  the  original  crime  of  slavery 
against  themselves,  they  drive  a  nail  to  preserve  the  pesti- 
lent edifice,  they  exercise  the  worst  of  all  wrongs  against 
the  whole  society  of  men.  For  they  estop  that  career  of 
universal  human  freedom  in  which  all  men's  faculties  will 
have  full  expansion,  which  for  the  first  time  will  justify 
the  existence  in  the  world  of  human  life.  The  liberation 
will  set  masters  free  too,  for  so  long  as  there  is  a  slave  or  a 
quasi-slave,  the  master  is  another  kind  of  slave. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

SLAVES   HAVE   NO   HUMAN   DUTIES   TO   MASTERS. 

We  are  seeking  principles  to  explain  the  sorry  mesh  of 
human  life  and  to  disenthrall  us.  Every  hoary  reverend 
idea  will  have  to  be  placed  in  the  category  of  doubt.  We 
must  calmly  think  of  the  ancient  sanctities  and  see  whether 
there  was  any  sanctity  in  them.  The  idea  that  human 
slavery  in  any  form  was  either  good  or  necessary  is  untrue. 
It  was  an  evil  in  all  its  workings,  without  mitigation. 
There  was  no  moment  in  its  career  when  its  existence  was 
justified.  It  was  the  father  of  the  false  moral  code  that 
the  subjugated  owes  duties  to  the  subjugator,  which  code 
stripped  of  meaningless  amenities  is  that  murder  and  rapine 
establish  moral  obligations.  Force  and  death  were  always 
the  pillars  of  slavery,  and  these  imparted  no  moral  obliga- 
tion to  the  enslaved.  It  is  the  primal  law  that  a  man  has 
a  right  to  fight  force  and  death  by  force  and  death  ;  nayr 
unless  the  world  is  to  be  given  over  to  the  rule  of  the  beast 
contingent  of  mankind  he  must  do  so. 


44  Human  Submission. 

The  law  above  all  laws  is  man's  obligation  to  be  free. 
His  right  to  freedom  is  inalienable.  He  could  not  accept 
slavery  and  be  moral.  He  criminally  sinned  against  the 
highest  law  when  he  bowed  his  neck  and  yielded  to  a 
human  yoke :  his  children  down  to  the  last  generation  of 
slaves  sinned  equally  in  inheriting  the  yoke.  So  that  his 
obligation  always  was  to  fight  his  enslaver  with  force  and 
death.  And  the  reason  for  this  was  not  an  abstract  right 
of  freedom,  but  that  none  could  reach  his  fulfilment  as  a 
slave,  and  the  good  of  men  one  and  all  demanded  that 
each  should  reach  his  fulfilment.  Here  is  the  far-shining 
fact,  all-penetrating,  all-determining.  Not  that  a  man  had 
a  right  to  fail  of  his  possibility  through  cowardly  slavery 
or  indolence,  but  that  such  an  one  was  an  evil-doer,  despi- 
cable, apostatizing  from  the  man  estate,  renegade  to  that 
call  in  him  from  the  deep  somewhere  to  the  best.  One 
hard  stony  trail  alone  led  up  to  the  bright  altitudes  of  his 
best — Liberty.  Every  slave  that  ever  passed  his  life  in 
slavery  was  a  millstone  on  the  neck  of  mankind,  every 
villein  and  serf  was  the  same,  every  quasi-slave  is  the 
same.  They  were  all  by  their  recreant  compliances  drag- 
ging the  human  race  in  a  wrong  and  depraving  course  of 
development.  Slaves  and  serfs  and  quasi-slaves  were  all  in 
a  team  with  the  masters  and  quasi-masters  carrying  man- 
kind through  black  regions  of  corruption  away  from  its 
glorious  goal. 

This  is  the  grand  indictment  against  slaves  and  quasi- 
slaves  for  which  there  is  not  one  breath  of  extenuation. 
c  They  would  have  killed  us  if  we  had  resisted  ? '  You  had 
better  have  died.  You  lived  and  continued  to  breed  cow- 
ards. If  some  of  you  had  died  you  would  have  lighted  up 
the  spirit  of  revolt  in  all  and  swiftly  annihilated  master- 
ship. More  of  you  died  vilely  as  it  was  than  need  have 


No  Human  Duties  to  Masters.  45 

died  honorably  to  free  you.  You  died  on  the  battlefield 
fighting  for  your  masters  when  not  an  atom  of  good  from 
the  fighting  was  to  come  to  you.  Why  did  you  not,  slaves 
and  serviles  or  both  sides,  turn  in  and  fight  your  masters 
together  ?  You  died  of  plagues  sown  because  the  conditions 
of  slavery  are  pestilential.  You  starved,  as  now  in  the 
twentieth  century  quasi-slave  descendants  of  yours  are 
starving  because  you  were  beguiled.  You  worked  in 
poluted  places  for  your  masters,  with  grim  death  at  your 
elbow  knocking  one  by  one  of  you  into  the  grave — and  was 
not  this  killing  you?  did  you  escape  death  by  running 
away  from  death  ?  You  entailed  it  on  a  thousand  genera- 
tions because  you  dared  not  strike  your  tyrants  to  the  dust 
and  be  free.  You  assisted  in  the  spoiling  of  all  the  race  of 
men  through  these  thousand  generations  by  your  caitiff 
subserviency.  A  master's  life  was  not  worth  more  than  one 
of  your's,  not  as  much.  One  grand  upblazing,  or  an 
iinquenchable  guerilla  warfare  against  them,  would  have 
terminated  slavery  as  an  institution,  and  saved  all  those 
slavery-slain  in  the  thousand  generations  of  its  dragging 
continuance.  Your  crime  was  that  you  left  your  masters 
peace  by  night  or  day  and  nursed  the  evil  on  through 
squalid  ages,  forbidding  human  progress. 

Slavery  lasted  because  you  built  in  your  lives  the  instinct 
of  cowardice  and  ever  transmitted  it  stronger.  Thousands 
of  years  ago  the  race  might  have  been  measurelessly  beyond 
its  status  of  to-day,  if  you  had  broken  forth  for  its  liberation. 
Would  this  have  been  nothing?  It  would  have  been 
the  greatest  thing  within  man's  sphere.  Every  person  who 
has  lived  his  pitiful  fragmentary  lot  in  the  interval,  would 
have  lived  as  man  is  expected  to  live  ten  thousand  years 
hence.  It  was  your  timorous  truckling  reverence  for  a 
master's  morality  which  prevented  that ;  the  masters  made 
and  patented  a  morality  to  clap  upon  you. 


46  Human  Submission. 

CHAPTER  VII. 
MANKIND'S  FALSE  EVOLUTION. 

We  are  concerned  to  know  the  chief  ill  imparted  to  man 
by  this  institution  as  it  bears  upon  moderns,  and  it  is  the 
slavish  instinct.  Slavery  as  physical  possession  is  dead,  but 
slavery  as  moral  possession  was  never  more  alive,  and  this 
\$  possession  of  the  exertions.  If  you  can  own  a  man's  ideas 
far  enoiigh  to  own  his  efforts  his  vital  substance  is  yours,  let 
him  call  his  body  whose  he  will,  even  his  own.  Such  is 
the  pass  of  the  slaves'  descendants,  the  modified  slaves  of 
the  modern  world. 

And  the  thing  is  done  through  the  slavish  instinct,  struc- 
tured into  the  brain  of  most  of  mankind  through  those 
ancestral  aeons  of  submissiveness.  Having  taken  the  wrong 
road  the  race  departed  ever  further  from  its  proper  goal,  and 
its  nature  developed  a  steady  divergence  from  the  right 
nature.  A  man  was  evolved  who  will  have  to  be  unevol- 
ved,  torn  down,  before  high  progress  can  be  even  com- 
menced. The  fabric  of  this  built-up  type  is  shoddied 
through  with  the  slavish  instinct,  the  slavish  conception  of 
things.  The  majority  of  men  cannot  think  in  terms  of 
freedom  any  more  than  a  dog  can  think  in  poetry  or  mathe- 
matics ;  it  is  beyond  their  present  mental  conformation. 
They  conceive  that  man  was  pre-organized  from  eternity 
upon  a  servile  model,  so  bottomless  in  them  are  the  springs 
of  servility.  Yet  that  vicious  constitution  was  not  in  man 
originally,  because  men  had  to  learn  to  be  slaves.  Their 
animal  ancestors  were  not  slaves,  nor  were  the  earliest  men, 
therefore  the  slavish  instinct  did  not  yet  exist.  Man  has 
the  sole  shame  of  having  added  this  infamous  instinct  to 
the  human  stock.  4  But  this  could  not  have  happened 
unless  it  was  good  for  the  race,'  some  evolutionists  will 
say ;  ( only  a  beneficial  instinct  could  have  survived  and 


Mankinds  False  Evolution.  47 

expanded  by  natural  selection  as  this  has.'  Let  us  see. 
Hobhouse  *  alludes  to  c  the  numerous  cases '  in  which 
wasps  "  tolerate,  or  even  feed  parasites,  which  live  upon 
the  food  which  they  store  up  for  their  own  grubs." 
Is  not  this  identical  with  the  instinctive  actions  of 
the  whole  human  servile  type,  who  share  the  good 
they  create  for  their  children  with  a  parasitic  class 
which  depends  on  their  doing  so  for  its  very  life?  The 
conservation  of  a  most  abnormal  and  injurious  instinct  is 
therefore  seen  in  the  lower  animal  world.  "  But,"  contin- 
ues Hobhouse,  "  we  may  quote  one  even  stronger  case  from 
among  ants,  whose  power  of  adaptive  modification  far 
exceeds  that  of  any  other  insect.  Every  one  knows  the 
tender  care  which  ants  bestow  upon  their  larvae.  Yet 
they  freely  tolerate  in  their  nest  the  I/omechusa  beetle, 
the  larva  of  which  eats  their  cherished  young.  It  is  as 
though  we  bred  and  tended  cattle  which  habitually  de- 
voured our  children."  But  does  not  the  servile  human 
type,  in  dividing  its  children's  food  with  the  parasite  class, 
often  robbing  its  children  of  needed  nourishment  in  order 
that  the  parasites  may  be  filled,  feed  and  tend  a  species 
which  in  result  literally  consumes  its  children  ? 

Nor,  says  the  writer  quoted,  are  the  ants  wholly  blind 
and  instinctive  in  what  they  are  doing.  For  they  "  not 
merely  tolerate  the  Lomechusa,  but  actively  tend  its  larvae, 
on  the  same  methods  by  which  they  nurse  their  own. 
Now,  it  happens  the  nursing  suited  to  an  ant  larva  is  fatal 
to  a  Lomechusa  larva,  and  in  course  of  time  the  ants 
appear  to  find  this  out  and  modify  their  whole  system  of 
nursing  "  so  as  to  preserve  the  hostile  larvae.  It  need  not 
be  observed  that  our  human  servile  type  likewise  nurses 
and  rears  the  offspring  of  its  parasites,  who,  when  they  are 


*  L.  T.  Hobhouse,  Mind  in  Evolution,  p.  74. 


48  Human  Submission. 

grown,  will  feed  upon  its  children  as  it  is  itself  being  fed 
upon  by  the  mature  parasites.  The  human  method  of 
nursing  and  rearing  does  not  have  to  be  modified  for  this 
end,  for  parasite  and  servile  tender  are  of  the  same  stock. 
This  purely  scientific  comparison  gives  man  the  best  pos- 
sible clue  to  his  nature.  A  harmful  and  debasing  instinct 
may  gain  lodgment,  it  may  survive  and  ramify,  expanding 
its  defilement  to  almost  any  limit  short  of  destroying  the 
race.  It  may  presumptively  pass  that  limit,  when  the 
species  dies  on  account  of  it  and  the  instinct  in  that  living 
vehicle  becomes  extinct.  This  is  the  cause  of  the  decline 
and  extinction  of  peoples  as  will  be  shown  in  the  sequel. 

At  present  we  must  take  further  testimony  from  the 
animal  world  on  the  stability  of  useless  and  hurtful  in- 
stincts and  forms.  A  specimen  of  the  useless  formation  is 
the  soldier  caste  in  ants,  described  by  Morgan.*  "In  the 
true  ants  there  are,  besides  the  workers  and  the  queen  and 
the  males,  the  soldier  caste.  These  have  large  thick  heads 
and  large  strong  jaws.  On  the  Darwinian  theory  it  is 
assumed  that  this  caste  must  have  an  important  r61e  to 
play,  for  otherwise  their  presence  as  a  distinct  group  of 
forms  cannot  be  accounted  for ;  but  I  do  not  believe  it  is 
necessary  to  find  an  excuse  for  their  existence  in  their  sup- 
posed utility.  From  the  point  of  view  of  the  mutation 
theory,  their  real  value  may  be  very  small,  but  so  long  as 
their  actual  presence  is  not  entirely  fatal  to  the  community 
they  may  be  endured. 

"In  regard  to  these  forms,  Sharp  writes:  (The  soldiers 
are  not  alike  in  any  two  species  of  Termitidse,  so  far  as 
we  know,  and  it  seems  impossible  to  ascribe  the  differences 
that  exist  between  the  soldiers  of  different  species  of  Ter- 
mitidse  to  special  adaptations  for  the  work  they  have  to 

*  Evolution  and  Adaptation^  p.  350. 


Mankinds  False  Evolution.  49 

perform.'*  'On  the  whole,  it  would  be  more  correct  to 
say  that  the  soldiers  are  very  dissimilar  in  spite  of  their 
having  to  perform  similar  work,  than  to  state  that  they  are 
dissimilar  in  conformity  with  the  different  tasks  they  carry 
on.'  The  soldiers  have  the  same  instincts  as  the  workers, 
and  do  the  same  kinds  of  things  to  a  certain  extent.  '  The 
soldiers  are  not  such  effective  combatants  as  the  workers 
areS  Statements  such  as  these  indicate  very  strongly  that 
the  origin  of  this  caste  can  have  very  little  to  do  with  its 
importance  as  a  specialised  part  of  the  community" 

It  is  apparent  that  this  martial  caste  is  a  positive  drain 
on  the  society,  for  the  workers  are  better  fighters,  and  the 
soldiers  if  workers  would  therefore  not  only  be  stronger 
protectors  but  would  be  productive  also.  On  the  whole 
then  this  caste  must  be  accepted  as  a  vicious  formation 
produced  and  harbored  by  nature  in  the  family  of  ants  to 
its  detriment. 

An  instinct  indubitably  pernicious  to  its  bearers  is  noted 
by  the  same  author,  in  the  behavior  of  some  animals  to  a 
to  a  distressed  mate.f  " '  Herbivorous  animals  at  such 
times  will  trample  and  gore  the  distressed  one  to  death. 
In  the  case  of  wolves  and  other  savage-tempered  carnivor- 
ous species  the  distressed  fellow  is  frequently  torn  to 
pieces  and  devoured  on  the  spot.'  " — (Hudson.)  Of  the 
herbivora  "  Hudson  points  out  that  it  is  not  so  much  the 
weak  and  sickly  members  of  the  herd  that  are  attacked  in 
this  way,  as  those  that  are  injured,  and  concludes,  c  the  in- 
stinct  is  not  only  useless  but  actually  detrimental '  .  .  .  . 
4  In  turning  against  a  distressed  fellow  they  oppose  them- 
selves to  the  law  of  being.'  For  they  do  not,  like  the 
wolves,  eat  their  injured  companion,  deriving  sustenance, 

*  The  Cambridge  Natural  History ',  Vol.  v.  1895.     Quoted  by  Morgan. 
f  Morgan,  411,  412. 


50  Hitman  Submission. 

but  aimlessly  destroy  one  who  might  live, — a  species  of 
self-destruction. 

It  is  established  then  that  a  pernicious  instinct  may  gain 
a  foothold  and  maintain  itself  in  the  animal  world.  That 
baneful  instincts  may  live  and  thrive  and  grow  in  man, 
sending  their  filaments  through  every  tissue  of  his  life, 
without  destroying  the  race,  is  a  sound  inference  from  this 
fact.  Independently  of  such  support  we  know,  however, 
that  man  is  saturated  with  a  series  of  proclivities  which 
cause  him  every  degree  of  harm  short  of  race  annihilation. 
It  is  not  the  place  to  examine  these  individually,  our  pres- 
ent interest  being  in  the  central  catastrophe  of  submission 
and  its  product  the  slavish  instinct.  That  man  went  rad- 
ically wrong  very  early,  and  has  ever  since  evolved  upon  a 
wrong  track,  is  nothing  new  in  nature,  having  as  shown 
strict  precedent  in  the  animal  world. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

MODERN  QUASI-SLAVERY  IS  ANCIENT  SLAVERY  DISGUISED. 

In  what  ways  does  this  servile  structure  of  man  display 
and  prove  itself?  We  can  trace  servility  and  its  conse- 
quences through  every  important  human  relation.  It  shows 
itself  conspicuously  in  the  organized  working  classes  of 
England  and  America.  Prior  to  the  extension  of  the  Brit- 
ish franchise  in  1884  it  was  confidently  expected  that  *  the 
working  class  would  vote  together  as  a  class  in  working 
class  interest,'  but  Mr.  Spender,  writing  recently  on  that 
subject,  *  points  out  ( that  the  working  classes  have  never 
voted  as  a  mass  and  are  to-day  farther  from  doing  so  than 
ever.  The  enfranchised  workingman  shows  a  marked 

*  In  the  Fortnightly  Review  y  Sept.  '04. 


Quasi- Slavery  is  Chattel  Slavery  Disguised*        51 

preference  for  propertied  representatives?  "  Direct  repre- 
sentatives of  labor  are  still  but  a  handful,  and  the  difficulty 
of  increasing  their  number  is,  in  the  main,  a  difficulty  of 
inducing  the  working-class  to  accept  them  and  support 
them."  Among  the  working  classes,  he  says,  the  diversi- 
ties of  temperament,  the  indifferences,  the  preoccupation 
with  bread-getting  and  saving,  the  amusements,  the  social 
distinctions,  the  deference  paid  to  power  and  wealth,  are 
substantially  the  same  as  among  the  classes.  "  The  social 
distinctions  of  the  East  End  are  even  more  intricate  and 
complicated  than  those  of  the  West  End,  and  have  the 
same  reactions  upon  private  opinion."  Under  no  conceiv- 
able circumstances  could  this  state  be  predicated  of  free 
minds  ;  it  is  the  fruit  of  the  English  workingmen's  slave 
instincts  and  the  light  and  feeble  characters  cultured  by 
these  instincts.  Trifling  matters  of  any  sort,  and  prepos- 
terous social  distinctions  among  themselves,  suggestive  for 
example  of  a  social  hierarchy  on  an  emigrant  ship  or  in  a 
poorhouse  (which  no  doubt  maintains)  divert  them  from  the 
problem  of  their  freedom  and  emancipation  from  the  para- 
site class.  Yet  they  are  goaded  to  action  by  every  possible 
sting.  Wallace  f  reminds  us  that  in  London  "  a  woman, 
trouser-making,  can  earn  one  shilling  (25  cents)  a  day  if 
she  works  seventeen  hours  at  it ;  "  that  "  a  woman  with  a 
sick  husband  and  a  little  child  to  look  after,  works  at  shirt- 
finishing,  at  Zd  a  dozen,  and  can  earn  barely  6d.  (12  cents) 
a  day  ; "  that  "  another  maintains  herself  and  a  blind  hus- 
band by  making  match  boxes  at  2  %  d.  (4  ^  cents)  a  gross, 
and  has  to  pay  a  girl  \d.  a  gross  to  help  her."  "  Here  is  a 
mother  who  has  pawned  her  four  children's  clothes,  not  for 
drink,  but  for  coals  and  food.  She  obtained  only  one  shil- 
ling (25  cents,)  and  bought  seven  pounds  of  coals  and  a  loaf 

t  Alfred  Russell  Wallace  :     The  Wonderful  Century,  351-1. 


52  Human  Submission. 

of  bread !  .  .  .  And  the  fifteen  years  that  have  passed,  not- 
withstanding the  '  Royal  Commission,'  leaves  it  all  just  as 
bad  as  before."  Wallace  wrote  this  in  '98,  so  it  is  up  to 
date.  He  quotes  Arthur  Sherwell,  who  has  found  that  in 
the  London  district  north  of  Soho  <  more  than  100,000  per- 
sons are  living  below  "  the  margin  of  poverty."  '  Probably 
even  these  people  are  keenly  attentive  to  their  social  dis- 
tinctions. 

Surely  this  condition  of  life  in  the  working  class  would 
be  a  maddening  incentive  to  action  in  any  beings  whose 
minds  were  not  dungeoned  in  a  slave's  instinct.  The 
English  working  classes  endure  it  placidly,  at  least  so 
placidly  that  having  the  ballot  and  being  a  large  majority 
of  the  electorate,  'they  are  farther  from  the  massed  vote  of 
the  masses  than  ever ; '  t  they  strongly  prefer  propertied 
representatives?  It  would  require  a  very  constructive  intel- 
lect to  call  their  condition  guasi-slavtry  instead  of  absolute 
slavery,  and  yet  they  cling  to  it  voluntarily  when  the  use 
of  a  strip  of  paper  would  end  it ! 

How  do  intelligent  Englishmen  view  this  thing  ?  Listen 
to  Huxley's  view  of  it.  Writing  in  '88  *  with  all  the  force 
and  eloquent  indignation  of  an  irresponsible  agitator,  he 
said  that  la  misere  is  a  large  and  increasing  fact  in  all  the 
great  centres  of  industry.  "  It  is  a  condition,"  said  he,  "  in 
which  food,  warmth,  and  clothing,  which  are  necessary  for 
the  mere  maintenance  of  the  functions  of  the  body  in  their 
normal  state,  cannot  be  obtained ;  in  which  men,  women 
and  children  are  forced  to  crowd  into  dens  where  decency 
is  abolished,  and  the  most  ordinary  conditions  of  healthful 
existence  are  impossible  of  attainment ;  in  which  the  pleas- 
ures within  reach  are  reduced  to  brutality  and  drunkenness  ; 
in  which  the  pains  accummulate  at  compound  interest  in 

*  Nineteenth  Century,  February  1888. 


Quasi-Slavery  is  Chattel  Slavery  Disguised.        53 

the  shape  of  starvation,  diseases,  stunted  development,  and 
moral  degradation  :  in  which  the  prospect  of  even  steady 
and  honest  indiistry  is  a  life  of  itnsuccessful  battling  with 
hunger,  rounded  by  a  pauper* s  grave.  .  .  I  take  it  to  be  a 
mere  plain  truth  that  throughout  industrial  Europe  there 
is  not  a  single  mamifacturing  city  which  is  free  from  a  large 
mass  of  people  whose  condition  is  exactly  that  described, 
and  from  a  still  greater  mass  who,  living  just  on  the  edge 
of  the  social  swamp,  are  liable  to  be  precipitated  into  it." 

Without  fear  of  contradiction  I  advance  the  law  that 
The  evolution  from  positive  to  quasi  slavery  has  been  a  pro- 
gressive evolution  of  brutality.  The  evolved  form  of  cruelty 
has  changed,  its  essence  has  become  sharper  and  more  de- 
structive. We  have  a  high  class,  the  spendthrift  class, 
which  consciously  imposes  these  conditions  on  its  support- 
ers ;  it  wills  these  conditions  ;  a  life  on  earth  (strictly  adher- 
ing to  Huxley's  description),  hardly  better  than  the  wretch- 
edness of  hell ;  and  this  is  the  requital  it  bestows  upon  its 
qualified  slaves  for  feeding,  clothing,  housing  and  garnish- 
ing it  in  an  order  of  luxury  which  makes  the  splendors  of 
the  ancient  world  vulgar  and  cheap.  At  no  time  in  the 
earth's  history  was  brutality  more  refined,  unerring,  inten- 
tional, and  universal.  It  is  now  gloved  brutality,  gloved 
in  religion,  political  necessity,  and  law ;  and  these  gloves 
like  the  rubber  ones  of  surgeons  in  operations  protect  the 
social  operators  and  render  them  immune.  If  they  openly 
inflicted  the  horrors  upon  mankind  which  they  do  inflict 
behind  the  skilful  shield  of  religion  and  law,  even  man- 
kind as  it  is,  besotted  by  the  instinct  of  submission,  would 
rise  and  destroy  the  machinery  of  infliction.  The  specific 
achievement  of  the  evolution  from  slavery  to  quasi-slavery 
is  the  perfection  of  these  safety  gloves  for  the  quasi-mas- 
ters.  Proceeding  through  an  intricate  apparatus  of  secular 


54  Human  Submission. 

laws  and  theologicomoral  justifications,  all  of  them  con- 
structed to  safeguard  the  master  in  his  work  of  vivisecting 
his  human  brothers,  brutality  is  more  universal,  more  abso- 
lute, more  deadly  than  it  ever  was  before.  Resentment 
and  revolution  are  quelled  in  the  people  by  extinguishing 
their  sight  and  destroying  their  scent  by  the  distinctive 
agencies  of  quasi-slavery ;  the  modern  slave  is  made  to 
imagine  that  he  is  free  ;  but  it  is  solely  the  strength  of 
the  slave  instinct  in  him  which  enable  these  threadbare 
agencies  to  work. 

Following  the  British  working  classes  another  step,  they 
have  incentive  of  another  kind  than  class  starvation  and 
stunted  bodies  and  souls  to  move  them.  Superfluous  Eng- 
lish riches  flare  before  their  eyes,  riches  of  their  own  crea- 
tion. The  increased  profits  of  the  City  of  London,  from 
1880  to  1890  were  $153,776,415.*  "There  are  sitting  in 
the  House  of  Lords,"  says  Wallace,  "  sixty  peers  who  hold 
possession  of  land  producing  a  rental  of  over  ^50,000 
($250,000)  a  year  each.  The  sum  total  of  these  sixty 
rentals  is  ^5,405,900,"  over  twenty-seven  million  dollars. 
This  sum  is  taken  by  sixty  men,  and  it  is  taken  out  of  the 
well-being  of  England.  Ultimately  the  producers  pay  it, 
those  whose  bodies  are  starved  and  whose  brains  and  souls 
are  stunted  and  who  are  in  luck  if  they  do  not  fill  a 
pauper's  grave. 

I  am  conducting  a  scientific  inquiry,  and  the  purpose  of 
this  citation  is,  with  its  help  to  measure  and  weigh  more 
accurately  the  bulk  of  the  surviving  slavish  instinct  in 
British  workingtnen's  brains;  for  I  consider  this  and  the 
bulk  of  the  same  instinct  in  still  other  classes,  the  most 
impressive  question  of  modern  civilization.  This  slavish 
instinct  is  the  secret  of  human  society,  institutions,  and 

*  The  City  Press,  quoted  by  Wallace. 


Quasi-Slav ery  is  Chattel  Slavery  Disguised.        55 

character  as  they  are.  If  its  strength  and  processes  are 
analyzed  science  may  for  the  first  time  be  able  to  propound 
intelligent  methods  for  the  succor  of  humanity. 

A  mathematical  formula  cannot  yet  be  given  for  the 
strength  of  the  slavish  instinct  in  the  British  working 
classes,  but  a  relative  formula  can.  It  is  stronger  than 
self-respect  in  the  British  workingman,  stronger  than  family 
attraction,  than  love  of  parents,  love  of  wife,  or  love  of 
children.  These  are  the  objects  personally  dearest  to  the 
normal  animal ;  he  will  fight  for  them  while  he  has  a  drop 
of  blood,  even  weak  and  shrinking  creatures  becoming  ter- 
rible when  their  young  are  assailed.  But  the  British  work- 
ingman  has  inverted  the  instinct.  He  is  abject  when  his 
wife  and  children  are  attacked  by  his  "  superiors,"  he  does 
nothing  to  defend  them  ;  but  he  will  fight  savagely  for 
these  superiors  and  their  children,  just  as  an  animal  will 
fight  for  its  own  offspring.  Thus  he  has  turned  nature 
awry  and  become  a  species  of  monster.  If  some  working- 
men  in  the  throes  of  despair  act  naturally  and  defend  their 
own  children  against  the  inroads  of  superiors,  other  work- 
ingmen,  whose  children  are  likewise  on  the  edge  of  the  pit 
of  starvation,  attack  and  destroy  them.  They  suppress  the 
levolters  to  deprive  their  own  children  of  the  chance  of 
escaping  this  cruel-jawed  pit. 

It  therefore  appears  that  the  entire  British  working  class 
are  perverts,  for  they  act  in  defiance  of  certain  of  nature's 
most  fundamental  instincts  and  the  highest  laws  of  self- 
preservation.  It  is  a  curious  thing  that  ants  trained  to 
slavery  will  behave  with  the  same  perversion,  fighting 
with  their  masters  against  their  own  tribe  and  blood.  The 
workingman  is  in  the  grip  of  a  still  deeper  instinct  which 
holds  him  like  iron,  not  only  stopping  the  machinery  of  his 
intelligence  but  inhibiting  if  not  consuming  his  natural 
human  emotions. 


56  Human  Submission. 

Astounding  as  this  phenomenon  is  it  is  partially  explic- 
able. The  period  of  absolute  slavery  was  many  ages  long, 
and  during  that  time  the  slave's  emotions  and  his  family 
were  entirely  subordinate  to  the  master's  will.  He  was 
separated  and  sold  away  from  his  wife  and  children  when 
it  pleased  the  master,  and  his  women  were  subject  to  the 
master's  passions ;  and  scores  of  centuries  of  these  de- 
humanizing abuses  destroyed  the  primacy  of  his  affection 
for  his  own  flesh  and  blood  and  substituted  a  cringing 
terror  of  attachment  for  his  owner  in  its  place — a  psychic 
condition  like  that  of  the  dog  toward  its  owner,  who  has 
learned  to  suffer  the  extinction  of  its  progeny  and  loyally 
lick  the  agent  hand. 

Another  phase  of  working-class  perversion  is  the  unhin- 
dered appropriation  of  their  daughters  to  minister  to  the 
passions  of  their  "  superiors."  Workingmen  witness  this 
quietly,  quite  without  a  cry,  it  is  so  much  a  part  of  the 
fixed,  religi'ous  order  of  their  state.  An  upper-class  Brit- 
isher could  no  more  get  along  without  his  brothel,  filled 
from  the  daughters  of  his  supporting  workers,  than  he 
could  do  without  his  chapel.  Each  ministers  to  a  necessary 
class  of  his  emotions  ;  and  the  religion  he  hears  in  the  latter 
teaches  those  at  the  dreg  end  of  the  social  line  the  sacred 
beauty  of  humble  gladness  in  the  station  to  which  God 
has  called  them. 

The  repose  of  the  working  class  under  the  upas  shadow 
of  this  bestial  function  of  their  girls,  surprises  only  those 
who  do  not  reflect  that  this  has  been  always  one  of  the 
foremost  uses  of  the  women  of  slaves,  so  that  contentment 
with  the  system  is  nearly  equal  in  strength  to  the  larger 
instinct  of  which  it  is  a  branch.  The  process  is  conducted 
so  naturally  that  it  cannot  be  opposed  without  impugning 
Providence  as  revealed  in  the  laws  and  economies  of  mod- 


Quasi-Slavery  is  Chattel  Slavery  Disguised.        57 

ern  society.  Virtue  will  yield  at  a  certain  pressure  of 
starvation ;  the  higher  class  applies  the  pressure  to  the 
lower  until  the  virtue  of  enough  of  its  daughters  relaxes  to 
equal  the  supply  to  the  demand.  Since  this  is  a  purely 
economic  process  no  one  is  to  blame  for  it  anywhere,  ex- 
cept the  girls.  The  moralist  flings  them  the  consolation 
that  their  error  was  in  not  dying,  but  this  is  merely  a 
formal  tribute  to  virtue,  for  no  moralist  expects  them  to 
die  and  thus  ruthlessly  limit  the  order  sent  down  by  the 
higher  society  for  their  bodies.  The  working-class  as  a 
whole  impassively  accepts  the  duty  of  contributing  its 
female  flesh  and  soul  to  sate  the  passions  of  the  caste  which 
owns  it. 

If  we  turn  to  the  British  middle  class  the  scars  of  their 
servitude  are  no  less  indelible.  Their  servility  of  character 
is  one  of  the  notable  phenomena  of  Europe.  They  observe 
the  state  of  the  working-class  for  the  most  part  without 
concern  ;  the  condition  of  the  majority  of  themselves  is 
precarious  and  sordid  ;  others  of  them  are  masters  whom  I 
have  described,  causers  of  that  terrible  working-class 
wretchedness,  bordering,  as  Huxley  said,  the  swamp  of 
starvation  ;  and  all  who  are  not  masters  and  causers  of  this 
indescribable  misbre,  aspire  to  be  such  with  a  burning 
agony.  It  is  a  frequent  manifestation  of  the  corrupt  and 
truly  slavish  temper  that  its  owner  has  no  conception  of 
happiness  apart  from  rising  to  the  oppression  of  others  as  he 
is  being  oppressed.  With  a  pitifully  few  bright  exceptions 
the  supreme  ideal  of  these  middle  class  people  is  to  force 
their  way  into  the  group  of  quasi-owners  of  the  working 
class,  to  become  also  their  tyrants  and  destroyers.  They 
are  profoundly  ashamed  to  be  middle  class,  and  rightly  so, 
for  it  is  a  position  of  universal  contempt,  a  more  invidious 
rank  than  the  working  man's  who  is  somewhat  respected 


58  Human  Submission. 

because  on  rare  and  phenomenal  occasions  he  riots.  The 
British  middle  half-and-half  class  never  riots,  the  slavish 
instinct  works  in  them  the  peaceable  fruits  of  groveling 
imitation  of  the  higher  caste  which  cordially  and  bound- 
lessly despises  them  and  knows  of  their  presence  in  Eng- 
land only  as  supplemented  of  the  working  mass  in  supply- 
ing their  support.  This  despicable  class  is  without  a 
country  and  without  a  mission  in  the  world.  It  sees,  or 
should  see,  how  unsound  and  foul  the  state  of  human  life 
is;  it  suffers  shamelessly  itself  from  that  state;  it  is  com- 
petent to  change  it ;  but  with  its  main  force  it  keeps  that 
state  just  as  it  is.  It  is  in  build  and  character  a  repetition 
of  the  working  class. 

And  why  ?  Because  the  masonry  of  the  slavish  instinct 
of  its  ancestors  who  were  likewise  slaves  fills  and  dominates 
its  mind.  Submission  is  its  main  capacity ;  it  answers 
blindly  to  the  mandatory  cowardice  in  its  forefathers'  lives, 
who  were  the  dregs  of  almost  geologic  ages  and  whose  chil- 
dren are  among  the  dregs  of  this.  The  inherited  baseness 
of  this  class  is  its  devotion  to  the  system  of  quasi-slavery 
from  its  greedy  desire  to  become  the  quasi-master ;  and  no 
mire  is  too  noisome  for  it  to  inhabit  for  this  end.  And 
what  are  its  chances?  Wallace  states  that  in  England 
"  the  annual  produce  of  labor  from  which  the  whole  expen- 
diture of  the  people  necessarily  comes,  is  estimated  at  1,350 
millions  sterling  (6,750  million  dollars);  and  this  amount  is 
so  unequally  divided  that  one  million  persons  among  the 
wealthy  receive  more  than  twice  as  much  income  as  the 
twenty-six  million  constituting  the  manual  labor  class."  * 
Subtracting  those  of  the  British  middlings  who  figure  in 
this  owning  million  persons,  what  is  the  reward  of  the  rest 
for  their  obedience  to  the  servile  deposit  from  antiquity  in 

*  The  Wonderful  Century ',  343. 


Quasi-Slavery  is  Chattel  Slavery  Disguised.        59 

their  nature  ?  Insult  galling  if  suave  from  above,  and  a 
hard,  cramping,  deadening  life  for  the  most  of  them. 

The  law  of  the  middle  class  is  that  it  will  endure  equal 
outrage  and  worse  contempt  than  the  working  class.  It  is 
more  servile,  for  whereas  a  fraction  of  the  working  class 
combine,  the  middle  class  is  lacking  in  this  courage.  An 
average  member  of  this  class  is  even  lower  economically 
than  an  average  mechanic  because  to  hold  his  caste  and 
position  he  is  forced  to  spend  more  for  dress  and  appear- 
ance than  the  mechanic.  He  submits  to  all  this  without 
complaint  because  his  dearly-purchased  genteel  clothes  con- 
fer a  resemblance  to  his  envied  superiors.  The  great 
majority  of  this  docile  branch  of  English  society  are  mer- 
cilessly bled  by  the  wealthy. 

Our  study  is  how  much  the  slavery  crystallized  in  their 
natures  will  cause  them  to  bear,  how  base  they  will  con- 
sent to  be.  We  find  that  with  the  bulk  of  them  resident 
close  upon  the  abyss  of  pauperism  and  starvation,  and  all 
of  them  wheedled  non-entities  in  their  own  land,  despised 
by  its  aristocrats  (their  supported  wards),  they  simply 
stand  pat  and  suffer.  Everyone  knows  that  the  British 
trading  class  is  not  considered  fit  for  association  with  a 
4  gentleman ' ;  Ruskin  bitterly  bemoaned  it,  saying,  "  I 
believe  one  of  the  worst  symptoms  of  modern  society  to  be, 
its  notion  of  great  inferiority,  and  ungentlemanliness,  as 
necessarily  belonging  to  the  character  of  a  tradesman ;  " 
but  the  tradesman  has  a  tough-skinned  mind,  he  doesn't 
resent,  he  gulps  the  indignity  respectfully  as  his  national 
portion.  At  one  time  he  got  a  great  deal  worse  (he  thinks), 
kicks  and  cuffs,  stripes  and  sword-thrusts,  which  he  still 
has  an  organic  memory  of,  and  mere  contempt  he  gratefully 
can't  feel. 

But  it  is  not  so  well  known  that  truckling  to  the  puerile 


60  Human  Submission. 

rank  and  riches  of  empty  social  superiors  is  a  characteristic 
of  the  highest  British  intellects,  the  men  of  science.  Yet 
Galton  avers  of  English  scientific  societies  that  c  as  Britons 
are  not  unfrequently  servile  to  rank,  some  of  these  societies 
seek  a  purely  ornamental  patron,'  some  mere  titled  person.* 
The  same  spirit  of  servility  pervades  scientific  men  in  some 
of  the  colonies.  The  Rumford  medal  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  Great  Britian  was  recently  conferred  upon  a  member  of 
the  McGill  University  (Montreal)  faculty  for  notable  scien- 
tific achievement,  and  a  banquet  was  given  in  his  honor  by 
the  University  at  the  Windsor  hotel.  Principal  Peterson, 
as  toastmaster,  proposed  "The  King,"  uThe  Queen  and 
Royal  Family,"  and  "  His  Excellency  the  Governor- 
General."  In  his  remarks  the  Principal  said  'that  he 
wanted  to  remind  all  present  that  the  future  King  of  Eng- 
land was  a  graduate  of  McGill,  and  that  at  the  last  con- 
vocation of  London  University,  at  which  Dr.  Peterson  was 
present,  he  found  that  the  Princess  of  Wales  wore  the  cap 
presented  to  her  by  McGill  when  she  visited  that  institu- 
tution  as  Duchess  of  York  two  or  three  years  ago.5  The 
instinct  descending  from  the  forerathers  of  Professor  Peter- 
son, who  were  slaves  and  villeins,  prevented  him  from  see- 
ing how  such  puerile  allusions  in  men  of  otherwise  com- 
petent brains  bear  up  the  British  strain  of  canting  servility 
from  generation  to  generation. 

Canada  pays  its  titled  Governor-General  $50,000  a  year, 
and  its  working  head,  the  Premier,  $8,000.  The  former 
dwells  in  a  state-furnished  palace  at  Ottawa  and  his  salary 
is  remuneration  for  his  social  services.  He  imports  the 
air  of  snobbery,  rank  and  aristocracy  from  the  mother 
country,  the  air  of  the  master  class,  which  always  carries 
with  it  the  counter  fact  of  popular  servility ;  and  in  her 

*  Natural  Inheritance^  p.  23. 


Quasi-Slavery  is  Chattel  Slavery  Disguised.        61 

titled  governor-general  Canada  purchases  from  Europe  a 
bracing  consignment  of  its  mother's  caste.  In  the  current 
Cornhill  Magazine  a  writer  observes,  "  The  European  at- 
mosphere distinguishes  Ottawa  from  other  Canadian  cities 
in  a  certain  feeling  of  caste  not  distinguishable  elsewhere, 
except  in  military  circles  in  Quebec  and  Halifax.  The 
Ottawa  girl,  however  poor,  may  be  her  own  maid  of  all 
work  at  home  but  must  not  seek  employment  in  a  shop  or 
office  if  wishing  to  hold  her  own  amongst  those  partaking 
in  the  hospitalities  of  Rideau  Hall." 

Those  who  usefully  work  and  whose  efforts  contribute 
to  support  the  governor-general's  ornamental  society  func- 
tions are  not  admitted  to  them,  making  the  tradesman  and 
shop-girl  from  England  feel  quite  at  home  in  the  new 
world. 

Early  in  the  Eighteenth  century  Montesquieu  spent  two 
years  in  England  and  gave  his  estimate  of  the  people. 
"  An  ordinary  Englishman  must  have  a  good  dinner,  a 
woman,  and  comfort.  So  long  as  he  has  the  means  of  get- 
ting these,  he  is  contented;  if  these  means  fail  him,  he 
either  commits  suicide  or  turns  thief.  All  classes  are  cor- 
rupt. Honour  and  virtue  are  held  in  small  esteem.  There 
is  no  religion  in  England.  If  one  speaks  of  religion,  every 
one  laughs."  These  are  the  proximate  ancestors  of  Eng- 
lishmen and  Americans  of  the  present  day.  A  great  deal 
that  is  blind  becomes  clear  by  studying  ancestry. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

THE   INHERITED   SLAVISHNESS   OF   AMERICANS. 

All  this  tremendous  bent  to  slavish  ness  the  American 
inherits  from  British  ancestors,  but  it  should  seem  that  for 
all  this  deeply  grained  instinct,  the  inward  swell  of  free- 


62  Hitman  Submission. 

dom  would  be  something  vital  and  irresistible  in  him. 
And  yet  if  we  expect  this  we  are  totally  deceived.  There 
is  no  process  in  the  whole  world,  no  scientific  discovery  >  no 
conquest,  no  commercial,  industrial,  or  political  event,  of 
such  portentous  significance  to  the  world's  life  as  the  action 
of  the  American  people  in  surrendering  their  property  and 
freedom  to  the  Rich.  They  are  but  obeying  the  universal 
law  of  popular  servility  it  is  true,  they  are  but  reacting  to 
that  stern  slave  instinct  carved  in  their  fibre  by  ten  thous- 
and slave  generations,  to  whose  iron  mandates  they  bend 
as  unconsciously  as  the  brute  does  to  its  good  or  evil  orders 
from  Nature,  and  yet  this  dissolution  of  American  hopes 
and  extinction  of  its  promise,  is  not  without  the  greatest 
pathos  of  all  the  catastrophes  of  mankind. 

The  difference  between  America  and  England  is  this  : 
the  people  of  America  have  had  the  greatest  freedom  and 
opportunity  on  a  large  scale  that  any  civilized  country  ever 
knew,  whereas  the  common  people  of  the  United  Kingdom 
never  had  liberty,  they  never  won  it,  and  never  tried  to 
win  it ;  as  preceding  facts  have  shown.  The  American 
renunciation  of  liberty  is  therefore  the  abandonment  of  a 
unique  supreme  position,  a  social  Gibraltar,  which  has 
been  the  envy  and  wonder  of  mankind.  It  is  an  evacua- 
tion and  retreat,  it  is  the  self-restoration  of  a  people  to 
quasi-slavery  after  through  a  lucky  dozing  of  the  gods  they 
had  escaped  it,  a  rehabilitation  and  triumph  of  that  indom- 
itable will  to  be  slaves  which  has  cursed  man  as  a  sover- 
eign instinct  through  immeasurable  spans  of  time.  Am  I 
exaggerating  ?  are  Americans  still  free  ?  are  they  holding 
fast  that  which  they  had?  I  think  only  our  new  master 
class  will  say  that  we  are  still  free,  with  their  tongues  in 
their  cheeks  and  their  hands  on  our  throats,  and  they  cer- 
tainly are  holding  fast  to  that  which  we  had.  I  will  show 


Inherited  Slavishness  of  Americans.  63 

how  like  the  eternally  subjugated  servile  English  our 
classes  are. 

We,  too,  have  trade  unions,  and  our  laboring  class  is  a 
preponderant  part  of  the  people  ;  it  could  save  itself  from 
the  mire  of  poverty  in  which  it  creeps  and  it  could  stem 
the  tide  of  ebbing  liberties  and  give  the  dying  body  of  our 
freedom  invulnerable  life.  But  like  its  confreres  abroad  to 
do  this  skilfully  and  with  saving  speed,  it  would  have  to 
act  in  politics  as  a  unit ;  and  here  is  its  everlasting  shame 
and  reproach.  It  will  not,  and  some  of  its  guides  and  in- 
terpreters tell  us  it  can  not,  while  still  others  say  it  should 
not.  This  is  because  it  is  a  class  of  quasi-slaves,  generaled 
by  quasi-slaves.  For  what  logic,  or  manhood,  or  intelli- 
gence can  there  be  in  the  following  behavior :  to  elect 
their  propertied  masters  to  office  and  then  send  up  com- 
mittees beseeching  these  masters  for  a  little  labor  legisla- 
tion, when  they  might  have  elected  their  own  men  to  make 
the  laws  they  want  ?  Only  minds  strangled  by  a  great 
superstition  or  relentless  instinct  could  perpetuate  this 
pitiful  puerility  if  anything  were  at  stake,  and  now  every- 
thing is  at  stake.  The  workingman  of  not  many  years  ago 
thought  he  was  as  good  as  his  neighbor,  but  he  is  now  the 
unregarded  atom  of  a  toiling  caste  which  drags  its  train  of 
misery  across  the  sphere.  He  is  now  the  humble  social 
dog  or  ass.  He  threw  away  what  he  had,  because  in  the 
slavery  of  his  soul  he  prefers  capitalists  to  make  his  laws 
for  him. 

Eleven  years  ago  the  American  Federation  of  Labor 
became  the  scene  of  struggle  for  united  labor  action  in 
politics.  After  ten  years  of  agitation,  ten  years  of  Trust 
growth  and  spoliation  of  all  American  classes,  ten  years  of 
expansion  of  the  liberty-throttling  party  machines  for 
which  the  working  men  voted  in  truckling  nerveless 

THE     K 

UNIVERSITY  } 


64  Human  Submission. 

herds,  the  Labor  Federation  meeting  in  Boston  in  1903 
rejected  united  political  action  for  labor  by  299  delegates 
representing  1,128,200  members,  against  65  delegates  stand- 
ing for  214,700  members  *  — nearly  five  against  one.  They 
decided  annually  to  put  their  employers  in  office  and  to  go 
on  their  knees  meanly  begging  favors  in  the  legislative 
anterooms,  of  these  employers,  only  to  be  scornfully  refused. 

The  Federation  Constitution  says :  "  Party  politics, 
whether  they  be  Democratic,  Republican,  Socialistic,  Popu- 
listic,  Prohibition,  or  any  other,  shall  have  no  place  in  the 
conventions  of  the  American  Federation  of  Labor."  And 
Mr.  Macarthur  speaks  for  the  Federation  majority,  the  five  to 
one,  when  he  pleads  that  it  is  the  undeniable  policy  of  wisdom 
( to  exclude  from  the  affairs  of  trade  unionism  all  matters 
upon  which  men  are  more  inclined  to  divide  than  to  unite/ 
This  is  but  proclaiming  that  American  workingmen  choose 
to  exist  as  a  captive  under-caste,  that  their  loyalty  to  them- 
selves, to  their  children,  and  to  the  human  race  is  weak  and 
flabby  compared  with  their  will  to  support  the  hard  caste 
above,  which  is  their  constant  undoing. 

And  this  labor  writer  continues  impressively,  "  The  fun- 
damental error  upon  which  political  action  is  based  consists 
in  crediting  government  with  the  power  to  solve  the  prob- 
lems that  now  affect  the  relations  between  employer  and 
employee.  ....  The  solemn  lesson  of  history,  to-day  and 
every  day  of  our  lives,  is  that  the  workers  must  depend 
upon  themselves  for  the  improvement  of  the  conditions  of 
labor.  Their  power  inheres  in  labor,  not  in  the  ballot ;  it 
is  the  power  to  produce,  and,  in  the  last  analysis,  the  power 
to  stop  production.  To  conserve  and  concentrate  that 
power  is  the  first  and  last  duty  of  trade-unionism.  .  .  .  You 

*  W.  Macarthur,  in  "The  Annals  of  the  American  Academy  of  Politi- 
cal etc.,  Science."     Sept.  '04. 


Inherited  Slavishness  of  Americans.  65 

cannot  solve  the  labor  problem  by  the  ballot,  nor  by  the 
bullet." 

Why  now  does  a  sincere  friend  of  labor  counsel  this  weak 
recession  from  the  front  fighting  line,  this  bald  surrender 
and  desertion  of  the  heavy  guns?  He  sees  that  the 
employing  caste  uses  politics  as  an  industrial  torpedo  to 
frustrate  labor  and  exploit  the  nation.  The  political  bu- 
reaux of  the  Trusts  are  one  of  their  foremost  departments ; 
politics  with  the  trusts  is  a  branch  of  industry,  is  one  of 
their  hugely  fruitful  engines  of  '  production ; '  the  Rich 
own  politics,  and  use  it  not  nobly,  patriotically,  humanly, 
honestly,  but  evilly  and  abominably,  to  give  a  lawful  aspect 
to  their  mad  greed  to  confiscate  all  that  the  people  have. 
Now  the  labor  leader  says,  We  must  not  interfere  with  them 
in  this,  their  especial  greed-field,y2?r  politics  is  not  business  ! 
To  labor  and  to  strike  and  to  beg  crumbs  of  the  million- 
aires and  their  secretaries  whom  we  elect  to  Congress  are 
our  functions.  That  is,  to  fawn  upon  and  flunkey  to  law- 
makers elected  by  themselves  instead  of  commanding  them, 
is  their  ignoble  function. 

Who  can  wonder  that  the  sorry  American  working  caste 
is  despised  when  it  offers  this  imbecility  in  anxious  excul- 
pation of  its  cowardice  ?  It  does  use  politics,  but  instead  of 
for  its  life  for  its  suicide.  It  elects  the  millionaires  and  their 
political  heelers,  and  empowers  these  to  make  the  laws  of 
labor,  industry,  and  commerce  and  undo  its  strikes.  If  it  is 
not  going  into  politics  the  labor  class  sho^dd  renounce  its 
vote  and  stay  at  home  election  days.  That  would  be 
honest  to  its  pretence.  It  would  then  leave  to  its  superiors 
the  act  of  electing  its  masters  and  enemies  to  the  office  of 
its  executioner,  whereas  with  insane  vacant  huzzas  it  now 
hustles  to  the  polls  and  fights  frenziedly,  laborer  against 
laborer,  to  elect  its  own  industrial  slayers.  Either  politi- 


66  Human  Submission. 

cal  batch  of  executioners  will  execute  it,  with  only  the 
difference  that  the  party  of  the  executing  part  will  be  called 
Republican  or  Democratic  according  to  the  fortunes  of  this 
mock  and  wheedling  war.  But,  so  firm  in  the  working 
•man's  constitution  is  caste,  that  it  is  a  terribly  vital  matter 
to  him  whether  he  is  executed  Republicanly  or  Democratic- 
ally. 

He  goes  to  the  ballot  in  two  herds,  thereby  nullifying 
himself,  and  places  the  Rich  invariably  in  power :  and 
these  rich  statesmen  and  their  understudies  the  senators 
etcetera  then  appoint  the  high  judges,  also  capitalist  under- 
studies, to  pass  on  the  laws  in  labor  disputes.  And  this 
also  to  opiated  organized  labor  has  nothing  to  do  with 
trade-unionism,  being  in  quite  another  field,  pure  politics. 
But  it  gets  around  to  pure  labor  before  very  long  and  in  a 
manner  which  makes  labor's  bones  crack.  At  the  last  con- 
vention of  organized  labor  in  San  Francisco  (1904)  its 
president  declared  :  "  The  open-shop  cant  and  hypocrisy 
aim  at  organized  labor  with  the  full  knowledge  that  it,  and 
it  alone,  stands  between  the  toilers  with  those  dependent 
upon  them  and  the  greed  and  avarice  that  would  force 
down  the  conditions  of  labor  to  a  bare  subsistence,  lengthen 
the  hours  of  daily  toil,  and  make  the  home  wretched  and 
desolate" 

These  are  very  strong  words  and  are  undoubtedly  fully 
believed  by  their  author  and  the  2,000,000  organized 
laborers.  But  all  these  men  at  the  base  of  their  hearts 
love  the  capitalist  and  worship  his  power  more  than  they 
hate  the  desolation  of  their  homes.  For  they  elect  rich 
men's  judges  (or  the  rich  men  who  appoint  them)  who  rule 
as  the  Appellate  Court  of  Brooklyn  has  just  done,  that  the 
*  closed  shop  is  illegal,  being  contrary  to  public  policy. 
Labor  in  the  last  analysis  instals  these  capitalist  judges, 


Inherited  Slavishness  of  Americans.  67 

directly  electing  them  or  their  political  creators,  by  its 
policy  of  4  keeping  politics  and  labor  apart.'  So  that  when 
organized  labor  announces  its  opposition  to  the  desolate 
home  we  seem  to  see  demonstrated  one  of  two  things : 
either  that  American  organized  labor  is  organized  stupidity, 
or  that  its  out-speakings  about  the  desolate  home  are  idle 
<  cant.' 

But  we  are  not  tracing  out  this  dense  imperviousness  of 
American  labor  merely  to  expose  it,  but  for  the  much  more 
serious  purpose  of  revealing  its  cause.  The  American 
laborer  is  the  immediate  descendant  of  slaves  and  quasi- 
slaves  and  the  entire  architecture  of  his  mind  is  impera- 
tively slavish  ;  he  does  not  love  a  desolate  home  for  its  own 
sake,  but  it  is  his  option  because  his  mind  is  of  hereditary 
enslaving  clay.  He  has  to  elect  the  desolate  home  in  obe- 
dience to  the  slavish  set  of  his  mentality.  There  is  poli- 
tics, a  weapon  which  would  surely  deliver  him  from  the 
desolate  home  and  all  black  menace  of  it,  but  eight  hun- 
dred years  of  quasi-slavery  in  his  begetters,  and  perhaps 
eight  hundred  thousand  years  of  previous  positive  slavery, 
compel  him  to  shun  that  saving  instrument  like  a  whip  of 
fire.  The  American  laboring  class  is  a  mixup  from  civil- 
ized European  countries  where  all  men  who  are  produc- 
tively useful  are  ipso  facto  pitiable  wretches  without  the 
substance  of  free  intellect  in  them.  They  are  submitters 
by  divine  right.  Now  a  few  years  or  a  century  or  two  are 
not  going  to  obliterate  that  primordially  upbuilded  slavish 
constitution,  and  that  is  the  reason  our  toiling  population 
prefer  to  continue  servile  and  base  and  be-robbed. 


68  Human  Submission. 

CHAPTER  X. 

BLOSSOMS   OF   SERVILITY — AMERICAN   REPOSE   UNDER 
ROBBERY. 

So  it  is  with  our  middle  class,  with  identical  cause.  If, 
now  that  everything  American  is  merged  in  financial  greed, 
there  can  be  said  to  have  been  an  American  Idea,  it  was 
the  repudiation  of  social  classes  from  our  system  of  life. 
Yet  social  classes  now  reign  full-blown  and  the  middle 
class  has  accepted  a  menial  lower  place.  It  waits  upon 
the  footsteps  of  the  rich  and  serves  its  whims ;  it  pays  the 
tolls  and  tributes  ordered  by  the  rich  unresistingly ;  it  has 
submissively  stepped  down  to  its  lowly  place  and  is  culti- 
vating the  suitable  thoughts  and  feeling  of  servile 
inferiority. 

And  the  reason  ?  Having  lost  its  wealth  to  the  rich  it 
now  accords  every  species  of  mastership  to  the  rich — indus- 
trial, political,  social,  intellectual.  In  a  war  conducted 
without  conscience  or  honor  by  the  commercial  tyrants, 
the  people  were  shorn  of  their  property  and  social  status, 
and  the  routed  people  now  accede  to  their  conquerors  the 
right  to  be  their  social,  political  and  financial  lords.  This 
never  could  have  been  if  the  middle  class  of  the  country 
had  ever  possessed  free  minds.  They  once  entertained  a 
few  ill-digested  fancies  about  freedom,  but  the  deeper  com- 
position of  their  instincts  and  intellects  was  even  then  as 
servile  as  the  worshipful  mental  medley  of  the  British 
shopkeeper.  This  alone  will  explain  why  they  allowed  a 
handful  of  commercial  adventurers  and  buccaneers  to 
throttle,  gag  and  bind  them  and  to  walk  off  masters  of 
America  and  its  wealth.  The  narrative  of  this  highway 
assault  may  be  given  in  many  ways,  but  I  think  a  view  of 
the  bony  framework  of  the  Trusts,  which  these  buccaneers 
have  built  up  out  of  the  people's  wealth,  presents  most 


American  Repose   Under  Robbery.  69 

accurately  and  vividly  and  lividly  America's  degradation. 
This  outline  is  condensed  from  Moody 's  resume  of  Trusts,* 
and  Mr.  Moody  is  a  devout  champion  of  their  ways. 

There  are'  (1)  Industrial  Trusts,   (2)  Franchise  Trusts, 
and  (3)  Railroad  Trusts.     Their  number  (mentioning  only 
the  important  ones)  is  in  all  445,  distributed  as  follows : 
Leading  Industrial  Trusts     .     ,     .     .    318 
"          Franchise       "          ...    V   111 
"          Railroad         "          ....      16 

Total     ......    "445 

/. — Industrial  Trusts. 

Of  the  318  Industrial  Trusts  7  are  altogether  greatest. 
They  are  the  Copper,  Smelting,  Sugar,  Tobacco,  Merchant 
Marine,  Standard  Oil,  and  Steel.  They  have  absorbed  or 
control  1,528  formerly  independent  plants ;  their  total 
capitalization  is  $2,662,752,100. 

But  298  lesser  industrial  trusts  have  acquired  or  control 
numerically  more  plants,  viz.,  a  total  of  3,426  ;  and  their 
total  capitalization  is  $4,055,039,433. 

And  besides  these  there  are  13  important  industrial  trusts 
in  process  of  reorganization,  representing  334  acquired  or 
controlled  plants,  and  a  capital  of  $528,551,000. 

The  total  number  of  industrial  plants  engulfed  by  these 
318  Industrial  Trusts  is  therefore  5,288 ; 

Their  total  capitalization     .      .      .      .      $7,246,342,553. 
//. — Franchise  Trusts. 

The  111  leading  Franchise  Trusts  are  composed  of  two 
groups :  (1)  the  important  Telephone  and  Telegraph 
Trusts,  numbering  8 ;  (2)  the  important  Gas,  Electric 
Light,  and  Street  Railway,  consolidations,  in  number  103. 

The  former  (8  Trusts)  have  absorbed  or  control  136 
plants  ;  their  total  capitalization  being  $629,700,500. 


*  Moody  on  Trusts. 


70  Human  Submission. 

The  latter  (103  Trusts)  have  embraced  1,200  plants,  and 

are  capitalized  at  $3,105,755,571. 

The  111  Franchise  Trusts  have  then  adopted  into  their 

family  1,336  plants ; 

Their  whole  capitalization  is     .      .      .      $3,735,456,071. 

///. — Steam  Railroad  Trusts. 
There  are  6  Great  Steam  Railway  Groups :     The  Van- 

derbilt,  Pennsylvania,  Morgan,  Gould-Rockefeller,  Harri- 

man-Kuhn-Loeb,  and  Moore.     Their  component  plants  are 

about  700  railroads  which  formerly  stood  on  their  own  feet ; 

their  united  capitalization  is  $9,017,086,906. 

There  are  10  Allied  Independent  Steam  Railway  Groups, 

which  have  consolidated  about  250  roads,  and  their  total 

capital  is  $380,277,000. 

These  16   Railroad   Trusts   have  therefore  assimilated 

1,040  separate  railway  lines  and  systems ; 

Their  whole  capitalization  is     .      .      .     $9,397,363,907. 

Mileage  of  Railway  Trusts. 
The  mileage  of  these  Groups  in  1903  was  : 

Vanderbilt 21,888   miles. 

Pennsylvania       ......     |   .     19,300       " 

Morgan      .     .     .     .     .     .     . .-.. •:,...  .     47,206       " 

Gould-Rockefeller       , 28,157       " 

Harriman-Kuhn-Loeb 22,943  •     " 

Moore  ,.' 25,092       " 

Total     .........  164,586       " 

In  1897  these  groups  had  but  61,833  miles. 
In  6  years  only  their  increase  has  been  102,753,  chiefly 
by  absorption. 

Total  Railway  Mileage. 

There  are  in  all  about  204,000  miles  of  steam  railway  in 
the  country,  of  which  the  6  Big  Groups  have  all  but  about 
40,000  miles. 


American  Repose   Under  Robbery.  71 

Of  this  40,000  the  10  smaller  systems  control  over  13,000 
miles. 

Less  than  27,000  miles  are  left,  dispersed  in  much 
smaller  railroad  systems,  and  not  really  vital  or  paying. 
When  it  becomes  worth  while  they  will  be  engorged  by 
the  large. 

Of  the  more  than  177,000  miles  of  vital  railway  mileage 
of  the  nation,  the  6  Great  Groups  control  95  per  cent. 
These  Groups  are  all  linked  together  within,  forming  really 
one  colossal  Railroad  Trust. 

The  financiers  at  the  head  of  and  entirely  dominating 
this  Railway  Trust  are — J.  P.  Morgan,  J.  D.  and  Wm. 
Rockefeller,  W.  K.  and  P.  W.  Vanderbilt,  Geo.  J.  Gould, 
Harriman,  A.  J.  Cassatt,  Jas.  J.  Hill,  Edwin  Hawley,  H. 
H.  Rogers,  August  Belmont,  Thos.  F.  Ryan,  W.  H.  and 
J.  H.  Moore. 

The  most  important  of  these  men — Rockefeller,  Morgan, 
Harriman,  Gould,  and  Vanderbilt,  '  are  interested  in  and 
more  or  less  dominate  all  the  groups  J  thus  binding  the 
whole,  and  this  whole  is  practically  dominated  by  Rocke- 
feller and  Morgan. 

The  reader  may  now  search  out  for  himself  how  the 
same  few  men  with  a  few  others  c  are  interested  in  and 
more  or  less  dominate '  the  other  great  trusts  mentioned — 
the  Industrial,  and  the  Franchise  Trusts,  and  how  imperial 
the  power  of  two  individuals,  Rockefeller  and  Morgan,  is 
in  most  of  them  also. 

After  musing  upon  which  until  he  has  measurably 
digested  its  force,  let  him  peruse  the  grand  totals. 

The  445  Trusts  of  the  three  kinds  have  absorbed  8,664 
independent  plants  or  systems  ;  their  combined  capitaliza- 
tion is  $20,379,162,511. 
This  whole  vast  bulk  of  capital  is  controlled  by  a  minia- 


72  Human  Submission. 

ture  group  of  individuals  over  whom  two,  Rockefeller  and 
Morgan,  predominate.  It  was  all  created  by  the  people  of 
the  nation  and  should  be  owned  by  them,  but  the  mass  of 
it  has  passed  from  them  to  the  Group  of  Huge  Rich,  count- 
ing altogether  numerically  a  petty  handful  compared  with 
the  nation's  citizens.  And  this  process  of  absorption  is 
advancing  with  velocity,  and  will  advance  until  everything 
the  people  have  is  absorbed  and  owned  by  the  Small  Rich 
Group.  These  rich  have  a  financial  process  which  uner- 
ringly draws  to  them  like  a  magnet  all  wealth ;  the  pro- 
cess and  its  ramifications  are  known  to  everybody  of  mod- 
erate intelligence  in  the  country  ;  they  see  their  riches,  the 
people's  riches,  being  taken  from  them  as  if  by  an  inva- 
sion of  foreign  brigands ;  they  see  the  whole  centre  of 
gravity  of  life  changed,  scores  of  thousands  who  were  pros- 
perous and  self-sustained,  made  dependent,  every  vestage  of 
equality  and  equal  opportunity  obliterated  and  the  entire 
people  reduced  to  a  degrading  vassalage  to  the  lawless 

invaders. 

And  they  submit. 

They  submit  because  their  ancestors  were  slaves  and 
hinds  and  because  their  minds  are  crowded  with  slavish 
superstitions  and  fictions.  We  are  from  those  English 
laboring  and  middle  classes  whose  last  spark  of  manly  fire 
seems  to  have  gone  out  with  the  slaughter  of  Wat  Tyler's 
insurgents  five  hundred  and  twenty-five  years  ago.  Sub- 
mission then  became  absolute  in  the  Anglo-Teutonic  char- 
acter, if  it  could  be  more  craven  than  it  was,  and  nothing 
has  shaken  it. 

Some  of  these  British  quasi-slaves  came  to  a  new  country 
and  proclaimed  liberty,  about  which  they  knew  less  than 
babes,  and  of  which  no  true  ingredient  was  in  them  ;  they 
brought  the  word  liberty,  but  they  brought  the  structured 


American  Repose   Under  Robbery.  73 

instinct  of  slavery,  guiding  the  course  of  their  feelings  and 
thoughts  as  granite  peaks  determine  the  windings  of  rivu- 
lets. For  a  time  Nature's  wanton  prodigality  in  the  New 
World  suspended  the  relations  governing  the  residue  of 
civilized  men,  and  because  nature  was  lavish  the  new 
Americans  thought  they  were  free,  they  even  thought  they 
loved  freedom  and  imagined  that  the  slavish  nature  of 
man  was  in  this  hemisphere  forever  extinct.  But  the 
slavish  instinct  was  still  supreme.  Each  man  set  about 
appropriating  all  of  nature's  bounties  that  he  could,  just  as 
he  had  seen  the  masters  in  all  lands  do,  and  those  who 
lagged  in  the  battle  of  appropriation  did  as  slaves  have 
ever  done — submitted,  and  let  things  go  whither  the  new 
appropriators  and  masters  willed.  Success  in  appropria- 
ting, they  imagined  as  slaves  always  do,  gave  plenary 
rights  over  the  expropriated.  The  beaten  in  the  rivalry  of 
getting  lie  down  and  let  the  beaters  run  things  and 
and  run  over  them.  Now  slaves  had  to  do  this,  and 
modern  people  out  of  their  subconscious  slave  reminis- 
cences think  they  have  to  do  it.  They  do  not  have  to.  The 
sharp  goad  of  the  slave-maker's  Force  created  an  irrepress- 
ible habit.  Why  should  men  with  a  swelled  power  for 
getting  run  society  and  human  life  ?  It  is  fit  doctrine  only 
for  a  mad-house  or  a  slave  world. 

Yet  this  is  the  philosophy  of  the  present  abrogation  of 
all  popular  rights  on  this  continent.  The  American  people 
are  but  a  segment  of  the  ancient  mass  of  servile  plasm, 
and  nature's  special  gifts  being  exhausted,  they  bend  their 
spines  to  servitude  just  as  meekly  as  the  populace  of  every 
nation  that  ever  existed,  save  one,  has  done.  They  do  so 
in  their  abject  piety  to  the  Great  Ancient  Mistake — Sub- 
mission. 

We  recall  an  ancient  allocution,  Blessed  are  the  meek 


74  Human  Submission. 

for  they  shall  inherit  the  earth.  Was  ever  a  word  more 
false  ?  Every  fibre  and  particle  of  it  is  untrue  ?  The  law 
of  life  is,  The  meek  shall  not  inherit  the  earth.  The  earth 
shall  be  taken  away  from  them  because  of  their  cowardice. 
They  shall  die  out  and  their  race  shall  die  out,  for  the 
spoilers  will  bereave  them  of  nourishment  and  life.  They 
shall  not  have  wherewith  to  persist,  and  their  type  shall  be 
known  no  more.  And  the  robbers  shall  inherit  the  earth. 
It  is  a  pity  this  was  not  comprehended  before  the  robbers 
had  already  inherited  so  much  of  the  earth.  But  it  is 
never  too  late  to  retrieve,  and  there  is  a  way. 


CHAPTER  XL 

LAWS   ARE   ANNUUvKD    BY   STARVATION. 

And  now  let  us  summon  a  picture  which  proves  my  say- 
ing that  man  has  carried  the  evolution  of  Brutality  far  be- 
yond its  simple  origins  in  the  kingdom  of  beasts,  that  man 
is  the  conscious  depository  of  cruelty  at  its  highest  power, 
that  he  chooses  cruelty  with  wide-open  knowing  eyes  be- 
fore he  will  yield  one  item  of  his  fierce  and  brutal  luxury. 
The  question  is  a  scientific  one.  We  are  looking  not  for 
the  food  of  hysterics  but  for  crystal  facts  through  which  to 
penetrate  the  innermost  nature  of  this  universe  and  its 
"god."  And  the  amazing  facts  we  here  register  confirm 
not  only  the  mad  brutality  of  the  rich,  but  equally  the 
marvelous  sottish  slavishness  of  the  victim  poor.  Here  is 
the  dark  inferno  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  heart,  seen  from  its 
deeds : 

"  There  are  25,000  starving  men,  women  and  children  in 
Tottenham,  London,  an  outer  suburb  of  the  metropolis, 
and  so  far  nothing  has  been  done  by  the  general  public  to 
relieve  the  distress.  The  crisis  will  assume  appalling  pro- 


All  Laws  Are  Anmdled  by  Starvation.  75 

portions  if  outside  aid  be  not  at  once  supplied.  Terrible, 
indeed,  is  the  lot  of  the  little  children  of  the  workless  men 
in  Tottenham.  Milk — the  prime  food  of  the  child  is 
almost  unknown,  except  in  tinned  form  and  in  microscopic 
quantity.  In  Tottenham  the  children  of  the  unemployed 
have  to  go  without  milk.  Young  men  and  women  who 
are  not  householders,  are  seeking  in  vain  for  work.  Every 
man,  woman  and  child  of  these  many  thousands  is  in  des- 
perate need  of  practical  human  sympathy,  and  if  this  does 
not  come,  and  come  speedily,  disease  and  destitution  will 
claim — as  they  have  already  claimed — numberless  victims. 
A  band  of  hungry  men,  driven  by  want  to  their  wits'  end, 
yesterday  attacked  and  raided  a  baker's  cart.  They  wanted 
bread  for  their  wives  and  little  ones,  and  to  silence  the 
piteous  cries  at  home  they  defied  the  terrors  of  the  law. 

"  (  We  have  not  been  able  even  to  fringe  the  need  of  the 
starving  population,'  said  the  Vicar  of  St.  Johns,  the  poor- 
est parish  amid  many  poor  parishes."  And  the  Vicar  con- 
tinued as  follows:  "I  saw  thousands  of  men  yesterday, 
whose  wan,  white  faces  bore  the  stamp  of  despair,  and 
whose  eager,  wild,  burning  eyes  spoke  eloquently  of  hun- 
ger's terrible  delirium. 

"  ( How  can  I  see  my  wife  grow  paler  day  by  day  ? '  asked 
a  laborer,  whose  once  burly  frame  had  been  attenuated  by 
want,  '  and  hear  my  children  ask  for  food,  only  to  be  denied 
it  ?  Can  you  wonder  if  I — a  man  who  never  wronged  his 
neighbor  in  his  life — should  snatch  a  loaf,  even  if  I  have  to 
go  to  gaol  for  it  ? ' 

"  The  men — with  few  exceptions  honest  men  of  highest 
character — complain  loudly  and  bitterly.  There  is  no 
work  for  them.  They  are  not  dissolute  thriftless,  unworthy. 
They  suffer  undeservedly. 

"  c  My  little  ones  are  so  good,'  said  a  mother  whom  I  saw 


76  Human  Siibmission. 

yesterday.  '  They  know  dad  is  out  of  work,  and  they 
never  fret  or  whine.  This  morning  they  went  out  break- 
fastless  to  play,  and  came  back  at  dinner  time.  "  Have 
you  got  any  food,  mother?  "  asked  the  eldest.  I  shook  my 
head.  I  could  not  trust  myself  to  speak.  "  All  right, 
mother,"  said  the  child,  stifling  a  sob  of  disappointment, 
and  together  they  trooped  out  into  the  streets  again.' 

"  One  case  I  came  across  was  that  of  a  painter,  whose 
wife  was  lying  upon  the  floor  suffering  from  erysipelas. 
He  was  her  sole  nurse,  and  their  four  children  occupied  the 
same  room.  He  had  been  out  of  work  for  six  months,  and 
the  home  had  gone. 

" 4  There  is  no  hope,'  said  the  doctor  who  is  attending  a 
mother  of  five  children,  a  sufferer  from  bronchitis.  '  Under 
ordinary  conditions  she  might  have  been  saved,  but  she  is 
starving.'  Yet  the  husband  is  an  able-bodied,  capable  man, 
who  has  tramped  weary  miles  each  day  in  futile  search  for 
work."  * 

In  bright  America,  the  world's  hope,  it  takes  this  form  : 
4  In  a  prison  cell  of  Philadelphia,  Bernard  Breckley,  a 
veteran  in  the  army  of  the  unemployed,  bemoans  his  fail- 
ure to  sacrifice  his  life  to  save  his  wife  from  starving.  His 
wish  to  commit  suicide  was  suggested  by  the  knowledge 
that  his  faithful  life  partner  would  get  $130,  the  insurance 
on  his  life.  Breckley  was  found  on  Thursday  hanging 
by  a  strap  to  a  fence  surrounding  Hunting  Park.  A  park 
guard  cut  him  down.  u  My  wife  was  hungry  and  there 
was  no  other  way,"  said  Breckley,  when  arraigned  in  a 
police  court.  I  have  tramped  the  streets  half  a  year  look- 
ing for  work.  Everywhere  it  was  the  same.  There  was 
nothing  I  could  do  to  earn  an  honest  penny.  I  worked 
last  year  in  a  stone  yard,  but  in  the  summer  I  fell  and 

*  London  Cor.     Philadelphia  L,edger,  Jan.  9,  '05. 


All  Laws  are  Annulled  by  Starvation.  77 

broke  a  rib.  My  wife  takes  in  washing,  but  the  money 
she  earns  is  not  enough  for  both  of  us.  If  I  had  died  as  I 
wanted  to,  she  would  have  got  the  insurance  on  my  life."  ' 
And  this:  'Exhausted  from  long  tramping  through  the 
streets  of  New  York,  emaciated  from  lack  of  food  and  ex- 
posure and  clad  only  in  thin  clothing,  Michael  Reddy, 
twenty-four  years  old,  of  Peekskill,  fell  unconscious  in  a 
snowdrift  yesterday.  Two  young  men  saw  him  and  carried 
him  to  Bellevue  hospital.*  And  this :  'To  keep  her  baby 
girl  of  three  and  a  half  years  well  and  happy  Mora  Malone 
has  been  slowly  starving  herself  to  death.  When  found  by 
Patrolman  Neville,  of  the  East  Twenty-second  Street  Sta- 
tion, New  York,  the  woman  was  so  weak  from  lack  of  food 
that  she  was  half  insane.  She  cradled  the  little  one  in  her 
arms.'  And  there  is  no  end  of  them.  Of  such  is  the  king- 
dom of  property-ruled  earth,  and  yet  we  respect  property ! 
The  dying  unemployed  are  a  perpetual  institution  of 
London,  New  York,  Philadelphia,  Boston  and  every  great 
Christian  city  of  the  globe.  When  we  look  at  the  children 
of  these  workless  sufferers,  however,  science  would  say  that 
society  must  be  composed  of  fiends  to  cause  and  maintain 
such  a  situation.  In  the  Johanna  Street  Schools,  Lambeth, 
London,  90  per  cent,  are  unable  to  attend  to  their  lessons  on 
account  of  their  physical  condition.  4  Ninety  per  cent,  of  the 
boys  are  anemic.'  In  the  London  schools  altogether,  122,000 
children  were  found  to  be  c  decidly  underfed,'  that  is,  16  per 
cent,  of  all  the  London  children.  The  investigator  de- 
scribed the  food  of  the  children  in  an  area  near  the  Houses 
of  Parliament :  "  Their  breakfasts  are  nominally  bread 
and  tea,  and  the  dinner  nothing  but  what  a  copper  can  pur- 
chase at  the  local  fried-fish  shops,  where  the  most  inferior 
kinds  of  fish  are  fried,  in  reeking  cotton-seed  oil,  and  this 
often  supplemented  by  rotten  fruit  collected  beneath  cost- 


78  Hitman  Submission. 

er's  barrows."  Dr.  Eickholz,  medical  inspector  of  all  Eng- 
lish special  schools,  thoroughly  equipped  to  speak,  is 
authority  for  these  statements.  *  The  name  of  John  Devil 
would  be  more  appropriate  than  John  Bull  for  a  country  of 
such  atrocities.  For  England  is  dying-fat  with  riches 
which  her  spendthrift  rich  burn  in  the  gorgeous  flame  of 
their  luxury.  The  United  States  repeats  and  excels  this 
lurid  state  of  shame,  for  we  are  richer. 

These  facts  are  a  scientific  elucidation  of  the  nature  of 
4  god,'  if  there  is  one.  For  he  made  man,  and  he  made  him 
with  a  nature  that  would  evolve  into  this  frenzy  of  cruelty. 
The  intelligent  are  not,  however,  to  be  angry  with  these 
pitiable  products  of  god,  the  rich  and  cruel  of  heart.  They 
are  only  to  feel  toward  them  a  terrible  implacable  indigna- 
tion that  shall  abolish  them.  Unpurchased  science,  look- 
ing calmly  at  facts,  sees  that  the  fact  there  are  rich  is  the 
cause  of  this  myriad-fanged  suffering  of  the  poor.  Abolish 
the  rich  and  you  will  abolish  the  suffering.  The  abolition 
of  the  rich  is  the  next  law  of  the  universe  to  be  executed. 
If  not  a  law  of  the  universe,  if  god  is  still  on  the  side  of 
the  spoilers,  it  is  the  adamant  law  of  men  of  brains,  march- 
ing through  the  black  fires  of  the  universe  and  dead  gods 
to  triumph. 

Long  ago  Machiavelli  laid  down  an  eternal  principle  re- 
garding these  rich  sappers  of  the  human  race.  "  These 
commonwealths,"  he  said,  "  wherein  uncorrupted  and 
genuinely  political  conduct  still  survives,  will  not  suffer 
any  man  to  live  in  the  fashion  of  a  gentleman  ;  they  are 
great  sticklers  for  full  equality,  and  vehement  enemies  of 
all  such  lords  and  gentlemen  as  their  country  contains; 
when  by  any  chance  such  like  persons  fall  into  their  hands 
they  put  them  to  death.  By  way  of  making  the  term 

*  See  Physical  Deterioration  in  England,  by  Burke  :  The  Forum «  Jan.- 
March,  '05. 


All  Laws  are  Annulled  by  Starvation.  79 

gentleman  quite  explicit,  let  me  specify  that  those  are 
called  gentlemen  who  live  in  idleness  and  all  abundance  on 
their  own  resources,  taking  thought  neither  of  cultivating 
their  land  nor  of  any  other  laborious  means  of  livelihood. 
Men  like  these  are  baneful  in  every  commonwealth,  but 
those  of  them  are  most  baneful  who,  besides  .their  general 
points  of  vantage  just  recited,  are  masters  in  strong  castles, 
and  have  subjects  obeying  them  ....  Men  of  this  stamp 
are  utterly  at  odds  with  every  frame  of  civil  existence"* 

The  men  who  live  on  others,  were  those  at  whom  this 
thinker  laid  the  sharp  knife  of  his  intelligence.  Always 
and  forever,  whether  they  are  masters  of  strong  castles  or 
of  strong  laws  made  or  bought  by  themselves,  men  of  this 
stamp  are  utterly  at  odds  with  every  frame  of  human  ex- 
istence. They  are  captains  of  the  Evolution  of  Brutality  ; 
they  are  the  cause  of  other  souls'  unutterable  anguish,  the 
lords  of  that  sky-staining  inhumanity  which  pauperizes, 
debauches,  tortures  and  starves  the  millions  of  poor. 

But  they  are  by  no  means  to  be  killed ;  they  are  to  be 
saved  and  transformed  and  loved  by  the  iron  will  of  the  in- 
telligent. Killing  belonged  to  Machiavelli's  time,  Aboli- 
tion is  the  divine  process  of  our  age  :  we  simply  terminate 
the  fact  of  their  possession  of  riches  and  thereby  kill  their 
poison.  This  is  the  law  of  a  science  that  is  no  respecter 
of  persons.  Heretofore,  O  Rich  Man,  you  have  bought 
your  science  as  you  bought  your  cheese.  But  before  the 
bar  of  an  unpurchasable  science  you  though  rich  as  god, 
are  no  more  important  than  the  least  of  those  weeping 
millions  whom  you  break  on  the  wheel.  Yet  with  every 
stroke  of  mutilation  you  deal  them  you  forge  a  brutaler 
curse  on  all  mankind. 


*  From  Machiavelli's  Discourses — quoted  by  Dyer,  Machlavelli  and  the 
Modern  State  >  pp.  136-7. 


80  Human  Submission. 

Now  when  society  starves  men  their  every  duty  to  society 
is  annulled.  Society  makes  them  outlaws.  It  withdraws 
its  protection  from  them  and  constitutes  itself  their  enemy 
and  murderer.  A  man  has  duties  to  society  only  so  long 
as  it  performs  its  obligations  to  him.  When  it  withholds 
the  means  of  life  from  him,  it  became  the  minister  of  his 
death.  Property  is  an  institution  of  society  and  its  laws  are 
binding  only  upon  those  within  the  social  pale :  for  any 
whom  society  has  outlawed  forth  into  the  night  of  want  its 
laws  are  naught.  Primal  self-preservation  becomes  then 
the  only  valid  law  of  these.  Their  duty  is  to  live,  and 
they  must  get  the  means  to  live  where  and  how  they  can. 
By  the  inalienable  right  of  existence  they  may  and  shall 
take  their  support  when  and  how  they  can.  Mankind  has 
repudiated  them,  they  are  thereby  enfranchised  from  its 
waste-paper  enactments. 

This  is  the  incarnate  truth  of  the  situation.  It  applies 
to  every  one  of  those  starved  sons  of  England,  dedicated  to 
death  by  England's  pious  rich.  It  applies  to  every  man  of 
ten  million  Americans  likewise  appointed  to  pauperism 
and  death  by  our  insane  seizers  of  our  wealth.  Food  is 
theirs  by  eternal  right  wherever  they  can  take  it,  so'  are 
clothing,  fuel  and  shelter.  These  people  cannot  steal, 
stealing  being  an  accident  of  that  human  organization  from 
which  they  have  been  expelled.  It  is  their  duty  to  pre- 
serve their  lives  and  their  little  ones'  lives  ;  therefore  it  is 
their  duty  to  take  what  food  they  can  reach  and  ennoble 
their  characters  by  doing  so. 

They  may  be  jailed  for  it.  That  will  be  good.  Why 
should  not  these  whole  ten  million  American  paupers  and 
semi-paupers  go  to  jail?  In  jail  men  are  fed  ;  while  they 
are  "  good  "  they  are  starved.  So  it  is  a  high  crime  to  be 
good  in  Christendom,  and  men  are  penalized  for  it.  In 


All  Laws  are  Annulled  by  Starvation.  81 

jail  those  who  have  robbed  them  of  the  right  to  live  would 
have  to  support  them.  Since  the  comparatively  poor  pay 
comparatively  all  the  taxes,  the  rich  cunningly  swearing 
theirs  off,  the  -burden  of  sustaining  these  ten  million  would 
fall  on  the  sixty-nine  million  comparatively  poor  of  this 
nation.  Adding  this  burden  to  the  huge  cruel  weight  of 
tribute  already  loaded  upon  them  by  the  one  million  rich, 
would  at  last  excite  them  to  perception  of  their  slavish 
state  and  its  blasting  retribution. 

Thus  the  Starved  can  not  only  save  themselves  but  they 
can  deliver  this  Rich-ridden  nation.  They  can  make  the 
first  winning  attack  on  that  structural  instinctive  slavish- 
ness  of  the  human  mind  which  this  book  has  exhibited. 
And  happily  they  can  do  it  without  harming  any  one — 
merely  by  appropriating  a  biscuit  or  a  cut  of  meat  when- 
ever their  last  prison  term  expires.  This  is  a  fair  and  hon- 
orable species  of  non-resistant  resistance,  justified  and  com- 
manded by  the  fundamental  laws  of  Being.  Gunpowder 
ruptured  feudalism,  this  potent  action  of  the  modern 
Starved  would  inaugurate  the  downfall  of  quasi-slavery. 
Neither  the  armor  of  the  knights  nor  the  stone  walls  of 
their  castles  could  resist  bullets — so  neither  could  stony 
hearts  nor  the  armor  of  religion  resist  the  moral  canonnade 
of  ten  million  starved  outlaws  swarming  American  jails 
for  bread  and  home.  The  act  would  drive  even  a  working 
man  to  ballot  for  the  life  of  his  babes  and  human  salvation. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  Eighteenth  century  the|ttlived 
in  England  a  very  enlightened  man  named  Woodward, 
Bishop  of  Cloyn,  who  punctured  the  scandalous  hypocrisy 
of  his  time  (in  which  it  was  the  forerunner  of  ours)  in  a 
remarkable  manner.  c  If,'  said  he,  '  the  poor  man's  rich 
neighbors  are  not  bound,  in  justice,  to  provide  for  him  a 
competent  maintenance,'  "  by  what  right  did  they  take 


82  Human  Submission. 

upon  themselves  to  enact  certain  laws  (for  the  rich  com- 
pose the  legislative  body  in  every  civilized  country),  which 
compelled  that  man  to  become  a  member  of  their  society ; 
which  precluded  him  from  any  share  in  the  land  where  he 
was  born,  any  use  of  its  spontaneous  fruits,  or  any 
dominion  over  the  beasts  of  the  field,  on  pain  of  stripes, 
imprisonment,  or  death?  How  can  they  justify  their  ex- 
clusive property  in  the  common  heritage  of  mankind,  un- 
less they  consent,  in  return,  to  provide  for  the  subsistence 
of  the  Poor,  who  were  excluded  from  those  common  rights 
by  the  laws  of  the  Rich,  to  which  they  were  never 
parties?"  * 

It  shows  an  extraordinary  mind  to  have  perceived  even 
as  much  as  this  a  hundred  and  twenty  or  thirty  years  ago ; 
modern  society  has  not  caught  up  with  it  yet.  But  the 
truth  goes  a  great  deal  farther.  Society  can  not  pay  its 
debt  to  a  man  by  maintaining  him  after  pauperizing  him  ; 
he  has  a  right  not  to  be  pauperised.  This  right  is  impre- 
scripible,  he  cannot  part  with  it.  Paupers  are  creations  of 
society,  wholly  unnecessary ;  every  pauper  or  semi-pauper 
thus  created  is  an  outrage  on  common  decency  and 
humanity ;  his  existence  testifies  that  some  are  playing 
swine  in  the  community,  robbing  him  of  his  opportunities 
and  rights. 

Now  our  rich  are  playing  this  part  of  swine.  They  are 
the  cause  of  the  terrible  and  revolutionary  pauperism  and 
starvation.  They  take  food  out  of  the  mouths  of  the  dying 
masses  to  turn  it  into  blazing  viands,  raiment  and  jewels. 
"  The  collective  contents  of  the  jewel  cases  of  the  fashion- 
able set  in  New  York  society  approximates  closely  to  $170,- 
000,000,"  says  the  Rev.  C.  W.  Nichols,  a  recent  authority 

*  Quoted  by  F.  M.  Eden,  State  of  the  Poor  in  England,  1066  to  1796, 
Vol.  i,  414. 


All  Laws  are  Annulled  by  Starvation.  83 

on  the  new  American  Peerage.  Mrs.  Astor,  Mrs  Vander- 
bilt,  Mrs.  Oliver  Belmont,  Mrs.  W.  K.  Vanderbilt,  Jr.,  and 
some  others,  have  each  a  million  invested  in  gems,  and  you 
can  easily  compute  how  many  of  the  servile  masses  this 
giddy  waste  robs  and  starves.  Mrs.  Ogden  Goelet  has  a 
dog  collar  with  a  soltaire  black  pearl  in  the  centre,  worth 
$200,000.  Dogs  are  valued  by  the  rich.  u  If  a  woman 
aspires  to  regal  effects  in  evening  dress,  besides  her  dia- 
mond tiara,  a  corsage  piece  of  diamonds  valued  at,  say, 
$75,000,  is  requisite,"  avers  the  Reverend  Nichols. 

Think  of  that,  ye  toiling  bloodless  starvers  in  the  slums 
who  never  see  a  full  meal  and  die  like  flies  to  give  your 
Rich  these  criminal  luxuries  !  They  are  your  rich,  for  you 
and  all  of  us  are  the  mine  of  flesh  and  blood  they  tap  and 
drain  for  this  death-stained  wealth.  Ah  these  women,  the 
women  of  our  rich,  consuming  thus  while  deep  down  in 
horrible  decay  other  human  beings,  women  too,  are  living 
in  hell,  dying  slowly  in  transcendent  agony  of  want !  And 
the  rest  of  us  look  on  glassily  passive  while  these  crimes 
are  done  !  "  It  is  asserted  that  the  annual  bill  of  clothes  of 
Mrs.  Potter  Palmer  of  Chicago,  runs  as  high  as  $10,000," 
which  would  support  only  twenty  families. 

But  let  us  cheer  ourselves  with  golden  visions  of  the  rich 
man's  garb.  Senator  W.  A.  Clark  who  helps  to  make  the 
poor  man's  laws  because  the  poor  men  want  a  rich  man  for 
their  legislator,  disports  a  sable  topcoat  worth  $2,000. 
The  wardrobe  of  a  male  member  of  the  ultra-smart  set  must 
contain  :  "A  fur-lined  topcoat  for  the  opera ;  an  Inver- 
ness, fur-lined,  without  the  fur  showing ;  a  Chesterfield,  in 
black  or  dark  gray,  or  a  Newmarket,  to  be  worn  over  dress 
clothes  ordinarily ;  a  long  loose  sack  overcoat,  silk  faced, 
for  spring  or  early  autumn  ;  a  double-breasted  Newmarket ; 
a  single-breasted  Prince  Henry  coat,  a  Strand  coat,  which 


84  Hitman  Submission. 

is  single-breasted,  with  tails  ;  rain  and  steamer  coats,  yacht- 
ing suits,  a  double-breasted  ulster  made  of  homespun,  golf 
costumes  and  a  short  covert  coat  for  between  seasons."  A 
man  who  would  be  of  this  family  of  American  Waste-Lords, 
must  spend  from  $1,000  to  $3,000  annually  on  his  clothes 
alone.  From  the  chemistry  of  our  working-men's  blood  it 
comes,  but  it  comes.  There  is  Clarence  H.  Mackay.  "  For 
dinning  at  home  at  one's  country  seat  in  summer,  nothing 
is  cooler,  more  novel  or  half  so  chic  as  a  light  Tuxedo  suit 
of  white  silk  basket  weave,  plain  twilled  silk  or  white 
duck.  Mr.  Mackay,  it  is  stated,  has  a  fuli  dozen  of  such 
outfits."  "  Wealth,"  says  our  author — and  we  do  not  need 
his  authority  for  it — u  forms  the  principal  ingredient  enter- 
ing into  the  composition  of  this  big  social  trust,  whose  sub- 
jective aim  is  pleasure,  and  whose  objective  one  is  to  make 
a  fine  art  of  social  life." 

Now  this  revolting  luxury  while  millions  fade  and  die  of 
sheer  elementary  need  is  the  rotten  fruit  of  Brutality  on  the 
social  tree.  Not  one  word  in  mitigation  of  it  can  be  said. 
Cause  :  Abandoned  waste  by  the  Rich  of  wealth  produced 
by  the  Poor  ; — Effect :  Ten  million  American  Paupers  and 
Semi-Paupers,  a  third  of  whom  are  slowly  starving  to  death. 
In  this  scientific  research  the  measure  of  abject  submission 
in  the  cells  and  fibres  of  the  human  brain  is  our  primary 
quest,  but  we  come  upon  by-products  of  high  significance, 
of  which  the  organized  and  increasing  flint-heartedness  of 
the  rich,  the  supported  rich,  is  one.  Mastership  burns  out 
sympathy,  intelligence,  love  and  heart.  In  permitting 
masters  to  grow,  society  creates  monsters.  The  rich  are 
universally  masters  of  the  rest ;  if  the  rest  allow  them  to 
exist  they  are  responsible  for  the  evolution  of  monsters  and 
the  whole  sequence  of  human  ruin  they  bring. 


Shall  the  Poor  Steal?  85 

CHAPTER  XII. 

HIGHER   LAW   THAN    PROPERTY — SHALL   THE   POOR 
STEAL    FROM    PRINCIPLE? 

Science  must  not  only  analyze  forces  and  facts  but  must 
indicate  remedies.  Going  back  of  the  usual  affectations 
about  man  to  facts  of  life  and  human  nature  which  have 
been  slighted  from  their  very  universality,  we  have  unfolded 
man  as  he  is — not  free  and  intelligent  but  loaded  down 
with  a  tremendous  handicap.  There  is  but  one  sentiment 
that  can  be  felt  for  this  friendless  waif  in  the  illegible  cos- 
mos, torn  and  deceived  by  Nature  and  himself, — pity,  in- 
finite pity.  Vainly  believing  himself  free  and  intelligent, 
it  is  his  character  to  deify  and  follow  the  promptings 
of  his  nature  without  delving  into  its  real  composition ; 
what  he  follows  thinking  it  freedom  and  intelligence  is 
this  monstrous  perverted  instinct  which  clasps  him  like  a 
serpent-fish  in  its  malign  arms. 

For  this  reason  the  methods  of  human  progress  adopted 
fail.  Because  of  the  immanence  of  slavishness  in  us,  the 
methods  of  ostensible  progress  are  slavish  and  illusory, 
assuming  the  rightness  and  lastingness  of  the  servile  warp 
and  woof  of  human  things.  Progress  therefore  builds  rot- 
tenly on  rotten  foundations.  The  methods  in  vogue  to 
bring  man  out  of  his  night  do  not  and  can  not  succeed 
and  they  must  be  rejected.  They  employ  the  instinct 
which  they  should  destroy.  If  man  is  locked  in  a  prim- 
eval instinct  which  stupefies  his  faculties  and  strangles  his 
will,  the  first  necessity  is  to  free  him  from  that  instinct. 
All  use  of  his  faculties  ere  it's  breakage  is  under  its  laws 
and  service.  Conceive  a  man  in  chains  so  that  he  can 
barely  move,  we  do  not  tell  him  to  do  thus  and  so  for  his 
own  good,  dragging  the  chains  after  him  ;  we  strike  off  the 
chains,  restoring  his  power.  Mankind  is  precisely  as  if 


86  Human  Submission. 

chained.  And  the  true  helpers  of  man-kind  are  those  who 
burst  these  irons,  while  those  who  teach  man  to  exert  his 
faculties  as  they  are  and  "  accomplish  something,"  merely 
instruct  him  in  the  art  of  staying  slavish  and  evermore 
abortive.  Both  intelligence  and  freedom  lie  before  man  to 
achieve,  they  will  be  won  through  destruction  of  the  servile 
instinct,  and  on  this  problem  all  human  brain-power  should 
be  concentrated.  By  success  here  man's  creative  strength 
in  all  fields  will  be  multiplied  immeasurable  fold. 

And  the  method  is  Resistance.  Just  as  it  should  have 
been  at  all  times  since  the  first  savage  succumbed  to  a 
master,  so  it  must  be  now  if  freedom  and  intelligence  are 
ever  to  be  attributes  of  man :  he  must  resist  implacably, 
furiously  and  unceasingly,  until  the  lives  of  masters  are 
miserable  beyond  endurance  and  they  fling  off  their  vest- 
ments of  power.  To-day  the  man  who  enriches  himself  out 
of  others  is  the  master  ;  they  who  are  supported  by  others 
are  the  masters ;  such  as  have  wealth  while  others  have 
want  are  the  masters  ;  and  to  these  the  remaining  millions 
owe  not  duty,  affection  or  fealty.  The  single  duty  owea 
is  their  abolition  as  masters.  Let  this  be  remembered — 
while  a  master  holds  quasi-slaves,  he  truly  admits  no  obli- 
gation to  them :  therefore  they  have  none  to  him. 

Happily  the  time  has  passed  when,  in  a  country  like 
this,  life  need  be  destroyed  for  quasi-slaves  to  become  free ; 
but  the  time  has  not  passed  when  extraordinary  methods 
of  resistance  are  requisite.  The  quasi-slave  must  revise 
his  ideas  of  morals.  He  is  organically  robbed  and  rifled 
by  his  masters,  who,  haters  and  hypocrites,  preach  to  him 
that  it  is  a  sin  to  turn  and  steal  of  them.  It  is  not  a  sin. 
Nay,  he  is  sanctioned  in  assuming  their  tactics  ;  it  is  right- 
eous and  just  for  him  to  '  steal '  of  them  by  the  laws  of 
self-preservation  and  freedom,  till  they  abjure  robbing  him. 


Shall  the  Poor  Steal?  87 

This  is  only  acceptance  of  the  law  of  high  financiers  by 
their  victims.  If  any  canting  strickler  for  dead  moral  for- 
mulae is  aghast  at  this  counsel  of  new  duty,  let  hirn  show 
that  the  method  of  the  highway  financiers  is  not  robbery. 
They  and  the  rich  at  large  have  opened  financial  war  on 
the  people,  by  flagrant  extortionate  swindle  they  are  en- 
riching themselves,  shall  their  prey  submit  in  terror  of  the 
phrase  that  it  is  a  crime  to  meet  commercial  thugs  with 
thugs'  weapons  ?  The  rich  have  abolished  the  law  against 
stealing  by  making  stealing  their  vital  principle,  enacting 
the  new  commandment — cThou  shall  steal,  if  thou  art 
rich.'  Let  the  poor  enlarge  the  code  to  be — 'Thou  shalt 
steal  if  thou  art  poor,  to  fight  the  rich  on  an  equal  plane.' 
If  the  people  embrace  this  law  as  a  principle,  there  will 
be  wholesale  consternation,  and  the  slow-witted  crowd  who 
feelinglessly  witness  their  fellows  starved,  plundered  and 
maimed  will  promptly  grow  excited  at  { what  the  world  is 
coming  to.'  That  is  whither  we  want  to  bring  them. 
Nothing  ordinary  like  social  starvation-murder  of  a  few 
million  poor,  or  general  confiscation  of  the  people's  wealth 
by  the  rich,  or  anointment  of  the  last  and  greatest  com- 
mandment, 'Thou  shalt  steal,'  by  the  stealers,  moves  the 
sensibilities  of  the  torpid  nation  at  all ;  and  yet  if  the 
slavish  instinct  is  to  be  surgeoned  out  of  it  and  the  race 
saved  to  great  things  it  must  be  stirred. 

Stealing  then  must  be  taken  into  the  poor  man's  creed 
as  a  stepping  stone  to  race-liberation  from  quasi-slavery  and 
non-intelligence.  Let  the  poor  man  who  is  perchance  still 
religious  not  fear  for  the  salvation  of  his  soul  from  this  new 
germing  of  his  virtue.  He  will  be  a  patriot,  bringing  on 
the  downfall  of  a  wealth  system  which  causes  myriads  of 
souls  to  enter  hell  before  they  die  ;  and  if  there  be  an  eter- 
nal reward,  stealing  to  eradicate  the  hell  from  this  life  will 
strengthen  his  title  to  the  heavenly  heritage. 


88  Human  Submission. 

The  defeating  weakness  of  quasi-slaves  today  who  yearn 
for  liberty  is  their  over-reliance  on  mass  movement.  The 
individual  is  the  greatest  dynamic  centre  there  is.  Every- 
one who  expels  the  slavish  instinct  from  himself  and  be- 
comes a  personal  revolter,  will  radiate  freedom,  intelligence 
and  revolt  in  wide  circles  about  him.  Individuals  can  in- 
troduce needed  unique  forms  of  resistance,  and  mass  move- 
ments will  follow  and  take  them  up.  The  organized 
forces  that  should  pioneer  progress  are  themselves  bowed 
and  servile.  What  more  so  than  Education  which  obsequi- 
ously accepts  and  promulgates  the  false  "  right  "  of  the 
rich  to  rob  the  poor,  and  is  therefore  a  pillar  of  quasi- 
slavery  ?  So  of  Politics ;  it  would  be  a  great  force  for 
liberty  if  men  were  free-minded  ;  they  could  speedily  work 
the  social  revolution  through  it  and  erect  the  free  frame  of 
life,  in  which  the  slavery  instinct  would  die ;  but  who 
needs  say  that  there  is  nothing  more  servile  than  a  political 
party ;  that  every  member  truckles  to  chiefs  and  bosses ; 
that  the  rich  own  the  parties  and  their  slavish  members  ; 
and  that  the  party  system  offers  a  dazzling  field  for  trick- 
sters in  the  coat  of  love  for  the  people  to  betray  the  people 
to  the  rich  ?  If  we  were  free  and  intelligent  we  should 
have  the  Swiss  direct  legislation,  with  which  the  people 
would  crush  party  machines  and  vote  their  laws  as  citizen 
sovereigns,  without  the  intervention  of  peddling  senates 
and  congresses, — but  we  have  not  direct  legislation.  And 
quasi-slavery  reigns  on,  and  the  rich  are  succeeding  in  their 
confiscating  revolution. 

So  that  every  individual  must  become  a  personal  resister 
in  his  own  way,  obstructing  this  false  life  and  blocking  its 
machinery  by  all  devices.  He  must  try  its  laws  by  the 
light  of  higher  law,  the  law  that  quasi-slavery  must  not  be 
allowed  to  live.  Purchased  Proprietary  law  is  not  the 


The  Murder  Laws  of  Property.  89 

highest  law.  Above  that  stands  Intelligence.  If  they  con- 
flict, Intelligence  is  king,  and  proprietary  law  contemptible. 
All  along  the  line  they  now  conflict,  and  the  truth  that 
beams  above  their  collision  is  that  proprietary  law  is  not 
law. 

CHAPTER  XIII. 

THE   MURDER   LAWS   OF   PROPERTY. 

The  discrimination  to  be  learned  is  between  Property-Laws 
and  Human-Laws.  I  am  not  creating  the  difference,  it  exists, 
we  must  teach  down-beaten  man  to  see  it.  Property-laws 
have  but  one  purpose,  they  are  to  fill  the  pockets  of  the 
rich.  They  do  not  recognize  the  existence  of  feeling,  suf- 
fering, justice,  duty,  love,  or  human  beings  ;  they  know 
only  that  Property  is  The  Absolute  and  that  they  have 
made  God  its  Chief  Policeman.  They  have  established 
that  the  poor  must  cheerfully  die  for  Holy  Property, 
and  if  they  cannot  do  it  cheerfully  then  wofully  and 
coercedly.  Before  the  judgment  seat  of  Property  the 
Human  Race  is  valued  at  nothing ;  it  is,  merely  to  manu- 
facture Property  for  these  Rich.  This  wide-winged  uni- 
verse emerged  out  of  its  nebulous  night  to  generate  the 
transitory  phantoms  called  poor  men,  to  produce  property 
for  the  glorious  bifurcated  grandeurs  called  Rich  Men. 
All  this  travail  of  time  and  space  and  suffering  has  been  to 
conceive  and  cast  forth  from  the  inscrutable  womb — Rich 
Men  !  As  far  back  as  all-extended  sameness,  when  the 
system  of  eternal  Forces  came  together,  wooed  and  con- 
ceived the  fashioning  of  sun  and  stars  and  this  little 
world  and  air  and  man,  their  high  most  heavenly  object 
was  to  ultimately  bring  forth  countless  cringing  serving 
things  on  trembling  legs  to  sacrifice  their  momentary  span 
of  being  for  some  great  things  on  proud  legs  whose 


90  Human  Submission. 

appointed  way  in  the  tremulous  orb  was  to  consume  all 
substance  and  men.  For  this  huge  aim  this  spacious 
strenuous  amplitude  of  Nature  has  groaned  and  strained 
and  run  its  course ! 

You  have  but  to  look  at  this  cruelly  conditioned  world 
which  the  rich  possess  to  know  this  truth.  It  shames  the 
sickly  Cosmos  that  it  is  so,  it  shames  all  creatures  living  in 
the  world.  But  it  is  so.  The  world  can  be  scientifically 
parted  into  mere  human  slag  or  toil-stuff,  and  Rich  Men. 
The  former  were  projected  out  of  the  knownless  void  to  be 
the  tenders  of  the  rich.  How  noble  a  production  of  these 
thrice-infinite  birth  throes  of  laborious  Mother  Being  !  In 
the  mind  of  Whatever  planned  the  cosmic  apparatus  this 
use  of  the  human  creature  must  have  clearly  organically 
lain — for  had  it  not  so  been,  would  the  fact  have  come  to 
pass  ?  To  this  mean  end  all  creation  has  ignominiously 
pined  and  spent  itself  ! 

Thus  to  be  the  apple  of  the  universal-eye  and  have  all 
being  spent  for  them,  these  rich  must  have  unmeasured 
value  in  themselves,  or  be  surpassingly  dear  to  the  earth 
and  its  firmament  acre.  And  what  is  the  quality  of  their 
preciousness  to  the  universe-builder  ?  Infinite  lust  of  self 
and  infinite  desolating  greed  are  their  essence.  Read  how 
they  prance  before  admiring  god  while  inch  by  inch  mil- 
lions of  his  worthless  motes  anguish  their  lives  out  in  want. 
The  other  night  the  high  society  of  one  of  our  cities  regaled 
itself  with  a  masked  ball.  The  occasion  of  its  principal 
transports  was  pigs.  "A  drove  of  little  pink  pigs,  with 
carefully  curled  tails,  was  turned  loose.  Screams  of  the 
ladies  mingled  with  the  squeals  of  the  pigs.  After  the  ears 
of  the  women  had  become  somewhat  accustomed  to  the 
porkers,  the  little  animals  were  petted  by  perfumed  jeweled 
fingers.  '  Well  I  could  kiss  a  pig,'  was  the  remark  of  a 


The  Murder  Laws  of  Property.  91 

handsomely  gowned  West  End  society  dame,  and  she 
suited  the  action  to  the  word.  The  pigs  romped  about 
everywhere,  tripping  up  dancers  when  they  were  not  in  the 
arms  of  some  young  woman.  Society  went  wild  over  them. 
The  pigs  were  not  the  only  novelty,  however.  Six  big 
Indians  danced  in  single  file  about  the  room  emitting  shrill 
war-whoops." 

Infinite  self-lust  and  desolating  greed  are  the  essence  of  the 
rich  of  this  world.  Therefore  these  qualities  are  those  most 
precious  to  the  universe-essence,  for  all  the  powers  in  the 
realm  of  the  known  conspire  to  make  the  beings  who 
possess  them  the  climax  of  creation.  Has  not  the  Builder 
or  the  Forces  fashioned  all  other  men  so  meanly  that  they 
shall  squander  and  pollute  their  lives  serving  the  vehicles 
of  these  abhorrent  attributes  ?  Was  the  Builder  or  the 
Force  so  feeble  that  he  could  not  instal  Beauty,  Justice,  and 
Intelligence  in  his  star-spanned  sphere  ?  It  seems  inferable 
of  him  to  say  that  he  has  made  what  he  wanted  !  Such  is 
the  world  from  the  pedestal  of  Property,  whose  laws  have 
ever  been  and  are  still  Absolute. 

They  are  many  of  them  Murder  Laws.  Here  I  trench 
on  a  morass  of  unperception  as  wide  as  civilization,  where 
Christian  man  can  see  no  farther  than  his  eyelids.  He 
divines  that  if  a  man  strikes  another  to  death  with  a 
weapon  he  is  a  murderer;  but  he  cannot  discern  that  if 
he  forces  another  into  an  environment  which  kills  him  he 
is  no  less  a  Cain.  And  yet  he  is,  and  the  day  will  come 
when  the  man  who  would  do  it  will  be  hunted  out  of  human 
society  as  most  infamous. 

Now  the  riches  of  rich  men  rest  on  such  murders.  Dis- 
cover what  the  twentieth  century  may,  this  will  be  its 
greatest  discovery.  Murder  with  the  club  of  Environ- 
ment— what  is  it  ?  A  few  nights  ago  Dr.  Horace  Carn- 


92  Human  Submission. 

cross  lectured  upon  tuberculosis  before  the  Upholstery 
Weavers'  Union  at  Kensington  Avenue,  Philadelphia. 

"  Owing  to  the  long  hours  and  close  confinement,"  said 
he,  "the  disease  has  ample  opportunity  to  spread.  The 
nature  of  your  work  requires  that  you  toil  in  rooms  closed 
to  all  outside  air,  and  this  usually  means  without  ventila- 
tion. If  the  factory  owners  would  go  to  the  slight  expense 
necessary  to  supply  you  with  better  ventilation  the  high 
death  rate  would  soon  decrease.  The  dust  incident  to  the 
manufacture  of  the  goods  in  the  upholstery  trade  also  ren- 
ders you  susceptible  to  the  disease  and  with  better  ventila- 
tion, fresh  air  and  proper  care  when  tuberculosis  has 
actually  developed  the  number  of  deaths  from  this  cause 
can  be  greatly  diminished"  Here  is  definite,  visible,  unde- 
niable, absolute  miirder.  But  it  is  from  behind  the  tree  of 
environment,  and  therefore  the  perpetrators  are  not  chased 
and  captured  and  punished. 

Look  at  the  tenement  hells  of  ill-health  in  which  the 
rich  force  the  poor  to  live  !  That  is  murder.  It  is  around 
the  tree  of  environment  and  therefore  the  rich  are  not 
chased.  Reflect  on  those  slain  daily  on  the  railroads, 
solely  for  the  profligately  cruel  greed  of  the  rich :  the 
bludgeon  used  is  Business  Profit,  and  it  is  not  recognized 
as  murder  merely  to  murder  men  for  profit.  But  it  is 
murder  in  the  first  degree.  Their  slaughter  is  diabolical 
assassination.  The  killed  were  9,840  in  1903,  and  76,553 
were  injured.  This  is  most  atrocious  murder  in  the  first 
degree,  without  extenuating  circumstance.  The  rich  mag- 
nate managers  and  owners  are  the  murderers.  They  are 
not  chased  by  the  vengeful  people  because  they  kill  with 
a  long  club,  long  enough  to  reach  their  victims  from  their 
offices,  and  Law's  sepulchre  eye  cannot  see  to  the  far  end 
of  the  club,  because  the  law's  owners,  these  Rich,  hold  the 


The  Murder  Laws  of  Property.  93 

near  end  of  it.  And  the  duty-dulled  multitude  think  it 
righteousness  to  surrender  their  lives  to  Railroad  Property 
if  this  venal  law  commands  it.  The  dupability  of  mortal 
man  was  never  more  luridly  illumined !  The  Trusts, 
which  have  confiscated  the  necessaries  of  life  and  will  de- 
liver them  to  the  needy  at  highwaymen's  prices  only,  are 
murderers  as  nakedly  as  if  they  shot  their  victims  dead. 
Years  ago  millions  of  the  American  people  reached  a  stage 
where  they  could  not  pay  a  cent  more  for  life's  necessa- 
ries without  starting  down  the  black  incline  of  want  and 
death.  Yet  since  then  trust  after  trust  has  advanced  the 
cost  of  indispensable  articles  of  life,  giving  these  millions 
of  citizens  a  debonair  kick  downward  to  the  grave.  These 
corsair  monopolists  are  not  chased  like  mad  dogs  dripping 
with  the  blood  and  life  of  millions  (as  they  are),  because 
the  Bible  of  Business  holds  it  to  be  lawful  to  tear  the  heart 
from  fellow  men  for  profit.  But  those  who  do  it  are 
assassins. 

So  it  is  amply  plain  what  the  murder  laws  of  property  are, 
and  no  man  should  respect  or  obey  them.  They  are  crimi- 
nal incitements  to  murder.  They  make  the  road  smooth  to 
murder  without  retribution.  Against  them  stands  the  in- 
vulnerable majesty  of  The  Human.  Ifs  Law  abrogates 
every  murder  law.  The  Parliament  of  the  Human  legis- 
lates that  all  men  shall  live  in  their  best  degree ;  that  the 
Right  of  Evolution  is  the  supreme  right.  Criminal  Legis- 
latures, held  in  the  palm  of  opulent  hands,  have  ever 
vapored  and  fulminated  against  Man  ;  the  Day  of  Man  has 
arrived,  and  it  ordains  death  to  Property  Despotism.  How 
incredible  it  is  that  when  a  certain  puissant  handful  of  our 
predecessors,  rebelling  grandly  against  the  slavery  instinct 
of  the  race,  killed  kings  and  expelled  nobles  from  the  new 
system  of  this  continent,  we,  their  feeble  successors,  should 


94  Human  Submission. 

set  up  Property  as  the  new  Lord's  Anointed  and  re-establish 
a  despotism  no  softer,  juster,  or  holier  than  the  infamies 
they  conquered !  And  as  men  owe  no  allegiance  to  tyrant 
kings  or  other  murderous  usurpers,  neither  do  we  owe  duty 
to  tyrannous  murderous  Property  ;  nor  can  the  ill  laws  of 
a  thousand  congresses  fasten  the  spectre  of  such  obligation 
on  us.  That  intrepid  defender  of  the  right  to  kill  iniqui- 
tous kings,  John  Milton,  called  such  laws  "  gibberish  laws," 
of  which  the  bulk  of  modern  statutes  defending  the  deadly 
onsets  of  the  Rich  on  Mankind  are  composed. 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

ARE  WE  VERGING  ON  REVOLUTION? 

Having  sought  to  exhibit  lucidly  the  havoc  of  the 
slavish  instinct  in  man's  affairs,  a  final  word  upon  its  bear- 
ing on  violent  revolutions  is  needed.  These  great  up- 
heavals are  caused  by  obstructions  to  righteousness.  In 
the  United  States  a  gilded  Plutocracy  accomplishes  a  re- 
pression not  different  in  kind  from  that  achieved  by  a 
Military  Autocracy  in  Russia.  There  is  no  freedom  of 
press  in  Russia  because  the  owners  of  Government  will  not 
have  it ;  in  the  United  States  there  is  none  because  the 
Rich  own  the  press  and  restrict  it.  The  people  of  the 
States  are  in  consequence  unheard ;  their  deeper  senti- 
ments are  excluded  from  public  prints.  They  have  no 
way  of  reaching  that  small  body  of  opinion  which  is  heard 
and  wrongly  passes  for  Public  Opinion,  though  only  Pro- 
prietary opinion. 

Hence  the  real  mind  of  the  nation  is  suppressed  and  un- 
known, while  the  press  does  but  nauseatingly  reiterate  the 
self-sufficient  judgments  of  proprietors.  Through  this  rigid 
exclusion  a  revolutionary  feeling  might  develop  to  almost 


Are  We  Verging  on  Revolution?  95 

any  pitch  without  discovery  by  the  proprietary  class  or 
press.  The  rich  might  drive  on  heedlessly  into  the  very 
jaws  of  revolution  unwarned  by  their  employed  writers, 
who,  absorbed  in  saying  what  the  rich  require,  could  inter- 
pret no  popular  signs. 

America  in  other  ways  resembles  Russia.  The  alliance 
of  the  law-making  powers  with  the  wealthy  constitutes  an 
Autocratic  Bureau  Class  like  the  Czar's.  The  American 
people  are  not  in  it.  This  insane  exclusion  of  the  actual 
American  people  from  their  own  property  and  their  own 
governance,  has  had  the  effect  of  binding  them  in  what  in 
their  eyes  is  a  fast  and  treacherous  Gordian  knot.  Having 
been  so  betrayed  by  the  two  honored  institutions  of  govern- 
ment and  business,  they  no  longer  trust  these  institu- 
tions to  get  them  out  of  the  slough.  Knowing  they  have 
been  shamelessly  duped,  and  hotly  indignant  at  their 
dupers,  they  are  also  bitterly  incensed  against  the  institu- 
tions that  have  so  well  served  the  tricksters  entrapping 
them.  Hence  their  revolutionary  loss  of  faith  in  peaceable 
means  of  rescue.  In  Russia  the  people  know  they  cannot 
be  free  without  a  violent  overthrow  of  institutions,  while 
here  through  the  seizure  and  abuse  of  institutions  by  the 
rich  and  their  political  clerks,  the  same  conviction  has 
gone  incredibly  far. 

There  is  good  ground  for  saying  that  the  nation  is  tread- 
ing a  thin  crust  over  fires  certain  to  be  far  more  furious 
if  they  break  than  that  eruption  which  purged  France 
a  century  ago.  We  have  suffered  a  degree  of  insolence 
from  the  rich  well-suited  to  feudal  tyranny  before  the 
French  Revolution  and  borne  it  feudally.  Submission 
caused  this  dangerous  procrastination,  and  if  a  violent 
revolution  follows  will  have  been  its  cause.  Resentment  of 
first  and  slight  encroachments  is  what  defends  from 
revolutions. 


96  Pluman  Submission. 

Notwithstanding  our  heinous  fault  and  mad  delay  a 
great  path  is  still  open  to  us.  Think  for  a  moment.  You 
are  slaves  not  to  a  great  army  but  to  your  ideas.  The 
power  of  the  rich  is  nothing  but  your  belief  that  you  should 
obey  them.  Cease  believing  this,  break  the  idols  of  your 
mind,  and  the  masters  will  instantly  sink  into  pigmies.  The 
fabric  of  property  must  be  shattered  that  life  may  be  rebuilt, 
and  you  will  shatter  it  when  you  destroy  the  fictions  of 
your  brain.  Make  your  minds  new  and  pliant,  and  then  ask 
yourselves  what  holiness  there  can  be  in  a  system  of  prop- 
erty descending  from  the  slave-making  savages  of  far 
antiquity.  The  property  system  is  saturated  with  its 
origins ;  if  everything  slavish  must  go,  the  property  system 
must  be  swept  away  with  it.  Property  rights  are  developed 
slave-catcher's  rights.  Repudiating  the  slave-catcher,  we 
repudiate  property  rights.  Since  the  slave-making  struc- 
ture of  human  life  has  always  rested  on  murder,  force  and 
fraud  and  is  invalid,  the  property  system,  whose  basis  is 
the  slave  and  quasi-slave  structure,  rests  likewise  on  mur- 
der, force  and  fraud  and  is  equally  invalid.  The  property 
system  is  without  moral  foundation.  Its  legal  foundation 
is  that  builded  by  the  enslavers  after  robbing  others  of 
freedom  and  property,  as  a  '  gibberish '  sanction  for  their 
crimes.  Every  day  that  the  property  system  lasts  the 
original  crime  is  repeated  and  ratified. 

And  this  is  why  we  are  threatened  with  a  French  revo- 
lution. It  is  because  the  people  know  that  they  have  a 
war  with  the  Property  Kings  which  grows  from  the  nature 
of  the  property  system  and  will  only  end  with  that  system's 
abolishment.  If  the  rich  would  heed  this  sorry  days  might 
be  saved,  but  they  are  sordid  profit-grabbers,  ignorant  of 
the  movements  of  life,  creeping  in  the  bowels  of  finance, 
wrapped  in  the  mummied  cerements  of  self. 


Are   We  Verging  on  Revolution?  97 

But  the  people  should  heed  it  and  accept  consciously  the 
war  against  the  property  system  which  is  in  progress  un- 
consciously. They  are  whipped  in  every  skirmish  because 
they  do  not  recognize  their  aim.  If  they  are  tossed  a  sop 
like  government  control  of  railway  rates,  they  fancy  they 
have  won  a  battle.  But  how  much  better  off  are  the 
people  in  foreign  countries  where  rates  are  supervised  ? 
And  how  near  are  those  countries  to  solving  the  first  pro- 
blem of  the  race — Property  versus  Man  ? 

If  the  people  will  think,  they  will  see  that  the  first  step 
to  freedom  must  be  a  revolution  in  their  own  heads.  They 
must  define  their  aim  and  bring  themselves  to  be  satisfied 
with  no  peace  terms  which  do  not  throw  off  all  the  tyranny 
of  the  past.  This  means  that  the  rich  must  go,  and  the 
property  system  must  go  ;  then  human  slavishness  in  every 
form  will  follow,  and  the  deadly  servile  instinct  will  atrophy 
out  of  the  brain. 

As  soon  as  this  aggressive  course  is  conceived,  it  will  be 
seen  how  foolish  it  would  be  to  use  so  huge  a  weapon  as 
violent  revolution  on  such  puny  adversaries  as  our  masters 
and  their  literary  and  political  domestics.  The  people  need 
but  sweep  the  rubbish  of  false  opinions  on  property  and  its 
rights  and  sacredness  out  of  their  minds,  and  the  opposition 
of  the  Tsars  of  wealth  will  crumble  before  them  like  egg- 
shells. 

The  people  are  now  under  the  ether  of  Property.  Those 
who  would  ensure  us  against  a  French  Revolution  should 
destroy  respect  for  the  property  system  in  the  popular  mind, 
that  the  people  may  be  liberated  from  their  trance  to  depose 
the  invading  Huns  of  Wealth  before  they  so  intrench  them- 
selves that  they  can  only  be  excised  by  furious  revolution. 


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